“Alison Lock’s ‘Thrift’ poetry book captures the untamed beauty shaped by human hands.”

‘Thrift’ by Alison Lock. £9.99. Palewell Press.

 https://palewellpress.co.uk/bookstore/environment/thrf/

A review written by Sue Proffitt

This is poetry of the wild, but not a wild untouched by humans; Lock’s poems traverse coastline, wetland, marsh, estuary, woods, fields, always with an eye for witnessing the complex, changing relationship between human and more-than-human, and how the impact of humankind is imprinted on the earth, for better or worse. Troubling themes such as climate change are touched on lightly: in ‘Melting Iceberg’  she sees something too enormous to contemplate …. as white space slides from frame to frame. In many of these poems life is lived on the edge, survival is not guaranteed, and the poet doesn’t shy away from bringing to our attention the many ways human beings threaten and abuse the natural world, as in ‘The Cruelty’ and, more obliquely, in ‘The final item on the news’ where a saw-whet owl is displaced from a felled Christmas tree in New York and, at the same time, the poem describes a little owl found in a chimney at home. In the final part of the book, Lock expands her poetic lens, and explores mythological landscapes embedded in our collective memory. 

The ancient lineage of the land surfaces in these poems, both in terms of its geology and the ways in which humans have exploited the landscape in the past, such as Devon and Cornwall’s mining history. Bright vignettes of wildlife surface too: fox, swans, owls, roe deer, wasps, magpies, tracing their tracks through poems. Plants, too, bring their distinctive presences into poems; in the title poem, a child of nine wants her world only to be her and cliff and sky, and this deep empathy with the natural world defines Lock’s poetry; fragility and resilience are held in fine balance, beauty is tough, and nothing exemplifies this more than thrift, which clings to cliff-edges and brunts the gales and salt of the sea. Displacement, entrapment, extinction: none of these themes are far away but the poet writes about them with great emotional containment, never lapsing into diatribe or sentimentality. People are displaced and abused too, as in ‘At the Foundling Museum’ where the poet imagines the thoughts of a mother having to give up her child.

Thrift is full of stylistic diversity; Lock sculpts her language to mirror her subject. There are stanza poems, prose poems, sequence poems and poems of patterns and shapes.  Experimentation with white space seems to be a defining feature, as in ‘Haar’, where words float down the white space of the page, held in suspension, just like the sea-mist being evoked. This is someone who loves words that wind round her tongue and her pen:  poems that beg to be read aloud.

Sue Proffitt