Slant Light [Paperback]

Westcott's musical and elegant work is clear-eyed and breathtaking in its approach to the fragilities of the self and the planet she inhabits.In her first full-length collection, Sarah Westcott immerses the human self in the natural world, giving voice to a remarkable range of flora and fauna so often silenced or unheard. Here, the voiceless speaks, laments and sings - from the fresh voice of a spring wood to a colony of bats or a grove of ancient sequioa trees. Unafraid of using scientific language and teamed with a clear eye, Westcott's poems are drawn directly from the natural world, questioning ideas of the porosity of boundaries between the human and non-human and teeming with detail. A series of lyrical charms inspired by Anglo-Saxon texts draw on the specificity of the botanical and its spoken heritage, suggesting a relevance that resonates today. Westcott's poems are alive to the beautiful in the commonplace and offer up a precise honouring of the wild, while retaining a deeply-felt sense of connection with a planet in peril.Bats
Inklings
Spring Wood
Form
Downy Mildew
Milia
For the Love of Young Leaf
Flowers
Lily

The Mariposa Trees
Fallen Monarch
The Faithful Couple
Wawona Tunnel Tree

The Vegetable Lamb
Green Giant
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Sentinel
Lambskin
Little Red
Pox Charm
Charm for Delayed Birth
Charm for a Lost Child
Hare
Mass
Messenger
May
Still Life
Sculpting a Mole
The Cannots
The Green Flash
And then he started singing again
Charm Against a Wen
Black and Blue
Cannibal
Eyas
Oxygen
Owls
We are listening
Afterlife
cloud

Notes and Acknowledgements Slant Light is a book of charms and wonders, full of birds and flowers. But Sarah Westcott is too good a poet to simply charm us, and the work here is fierce with intelligence, compassion and the sheer exuberance of attending to what Hopkins called 'the dearest freshness l³g