Wide River

Jane Frank

In every poetry collection, there is one aspect, one overwhelming impression, that we are left with which later comes to define it for us. In Frank’s Wide River, it is the poet’s quiet insistence on reawakening us to the essential wonder of our world that stays with us. In the course of twenty-seven poems, the possibility of any expected or staid response is deliberately peeled away; if familiarity breeds blindness, Frank’s overwhelming achievement is surely to restore us to a gloriously sensitised vision of things. … How this is achieved is more complex than may first appear. Frank writes in free verse, in a style that is lyrical, lucid and deceptively approachable. There is a seamless quality underpinning her poetry, making the reading of it an effortless and thoroughly enjoyable experience. Early on, she reminds us that it’s easier ‘to follow the natural course of things’ (‘The Mary’). The observation is slipped in gently, almost unobtrusively, but grows in resonance as the chapbook unfolds. Like ‘The Mary’– the river after which the book is named – the poems carry us forward through the natural course of a life deeply felt and keenly observed, charting a path as meandering as that of the river itself.

Wide River

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