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REVIEW BY CH
For this collection of 34 poems imagining western England’s prehistoric and Roman pasts, Slow Migrations is a fitting title. Many of the works within – inspired by the Corinium Museum in Cirencester and the Roman Baths at Bath – have a darkly meditative feel, conjuring coiling roots, winding steps, flowing water. Others carry a differently evocative energy between their lines, such as the scratchy, rootling rhythm of ‘Listen to the Pigs’, or ‘Unboxing the Dead’, which is set in an osteological lab and is starkly shorn of indefinite articles, its words as disjointed as the bones that it describes. Some of the poems rhyme, others do not; one is inspired by a Shakespearean sonnet, another written as a response to an Anglo-Saxon elegy. Their subjects are just as diverse, describing prehistoric people, processes (transforming stone into tools, clay into pots, wolves into dogs), and places, as well as Roman curse tablets, votive offerings, and Bath’s sacred spring where ‘bubble-prayers rise in silver clusters’.
Slow Migrations
Adam Horovitz
Indigo Dreams Publishing, £10
ISBN 978-1912876945
