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The cactus of a bright sky by Alan Finlay Dye Hard Press, 2021 ISBN 978-0-9869982-9-4 16pp.
Alan Finlay's chapbook is only 10 pages of text with a lot of white space. But its density makes it a weighty book.
As in most of Finlay's work, the subject matter is a complexity of relationships and family: hurt and affliction, the possibility of love. His materials are closely observed images, otherworldly metaphors, colloquial language, and a spacious musicality. Verbal music has always been important in Finlay's poetry - his last two books pushing from the riverbank (Dye Hard Press, 2010) and That kind of door (Deep South, 2017) use a comprehensive poetical-musical notation of his own, which makes use of indents and intervals, odd hiatuses, and non-standard capitalisation and punctuation.
The cactus of a bright sky takes these themes and musical structures further, with more confidence, while introducing a mythical dimension, an open border between realism and metaphor. Running through these seven poems is Finlay's family...