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pushing from the riverbank: poems by Alan Finlay Sandton: Dye Hard Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-620-48421-3 Pback, 45pp
The poems in pushing from the riverbank move in a space of being where all attempts to hold on to something resist us. "Everything fails, and then is born again. " Returning from holiday, the lawn is overgrown, the cat lost, the neighbour encroaches on the border, the three-year old fights off the dangers of the world, the beloved suffers, the roles demanded of us seem larger than ourselves. "i say to my son: i love you he breaks free ". There is desolation and amazement in that. There is no match between what life offers and what we need, the poet says - "our needs rest on the twigs of a river crossing". Yet, he seems to tell us, we continue shaping, trying to interpret what surrounds us.
pushing from the riverbank is Alan Finlay's fourth collection of poems and although it contains only about 20 poems, prose poems and a few illustrations, it is a large collection in what is asks about boundaries of self, life, of what words can do. The first poem, wind & sea, starts with an epigraph by Gertude Stein - "why after a thing is named write about it". Appropriate, because these writings are a naming, a searching for what is beyond words, where being is in the spaces between.
The poet uses spaces in visibly startling ways, even creating a sense of looking for the possibility of the rightand left sides of the poem reading as two interlinking streams in wind& sea...