![]() There are some strong poems and plenty of powerful moments. However, you can feel the way the poet reaches for meaning: ‘Grow the bleach from your hair, cut the ends clean away,/embrace the darkness that has been mauling/at your roots for years’ (‘Waxing’), and she is an adept at skilful line-endings. ![]() At times, it can feel rather too over-wrought, and sometimes the metaphors clash. This is a book of pain, and the imagery often commands attention. The poet has chosen a more fraught scene from the myth, or perhaps goes beyond it, to where there is ‘Spiralling darkness./Then the boundless/black-blue of bruises’, where ‘Your golden band/appals me,/folded about this finger,//swollen and salted/as a womb-pickled/baby’. ![]() ![]() Though her usual personification is of the calmer, sunnier aspects of the sea, you don’t get that here. The title poem ‘Salacia’ plunges us into oceanic depths, the poet drawing on Roman mythology here, Salacia being goddess of the sea and salt water. Other female personae are used to explore themes of sacrificial love (‘Blodeuwedd’) and anorexia (‘Shrinking’, which draws on the historical ‘fasting girl’ Sarah Jacob’s demise). There is a potent imagination at work here, where the crowd are described with their ‘mouths wide/as caverns’ as Gwen steps defiantly into the noose. Written in first person, the voice inhabits the moments before and as the ‘gallow-wood cracked/and knocked beneath me’. ![]() This collection opens with the darkly powerful poem, ‘Gwen Ellis’, ‘the first woman to be hanged for witchcraft in Wales’, the note tells us. ![]()
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