Ghosts

A collection where the people of the past are continually present. Anna Wigley is one of Wales's most highly respected poets, and Ghosts is her fourth, and best collection to date.

About the Author :
Anna Wigley was born in Cardiff and currently lives in Roath. She studied at Cardiff University and gained a PhD on the novels of Iris Murdoch. She has been published in numerous poetry magazines and won many prizes for her poems and essays, Ghosts is her fourth poetry collection.

Review :
Anna Wigley is one of Wales's most highly respected poets, and Ghosts is her fourth – and best – collection to date. The ghosts which haunt her are those people who have left, sometimes literally, their mark on her, but they are also those past encounters which continue to excite and scare her, to confound and console her. The poems, which take us from Albany Road to Pembrokeshire, from birds to cats, from Alison Moyet to Cleopatra, from surgery to Swan Lake, are accessible, concise and profound. Ghosts is an intriguing new volume of rich and engaging poems from prestigious, prize-winning poet Anna Wigley. The poems are beautifully crafted with a lightness of touch and masterful engagement with the natural world and other subjects. Wigley’s astute observation of life and some of the animals and people she encounters spans both realism and mysticism in an unpretentious way. There is a worldliness and charm which adds richness to the text and to the experience of absorbing these poems, with Wigley capturing ‘everyday’ occurrences in nature which are familiar and yet hard to define in words. In ‘The Owl’, for example, she portrays the essence of the bird and human sensitivity to it: ‘Seven times, the owl called outside your window in the night; seven times you listened as if the feathered ghost had called your name, a summons from your world to his ...’ Wigley’s success in merging the real world with a dreamlike quality is evident in many of these poems, including ‘Shrew’: ‘and folded in my coat like a fairy purse, your thin feet perfect, the thistledown of your pelt rich as a Holbein ambassador’s robe ...’ While in ‘Vision’, a white cat stalks across an urban road in autumn and becomes ‘one of God’s rainy-day creations,/a fantasy in fur and silky light’. ‘Seamarks’, an outstanding poem, has a balanced visual completeness. Wigley’s account of the sea and shore is almost theatrically placed within the framework of the company of another person: ‘there were salt breezes sweeping the gritty ballroom of the shore, gulls blown off course and crabs the size of my fingernail fumbling in rock pools.’ The beauty of this collection is the subject realm of the book, which blends clarity and depth of metaphor. The emotions portrayed are constantly and quietly simmering beneath each poem, sometimes emerging in fullness. The poems which stem from local, known places are wonderfully engaging, driven by a sense of exploration. ‘Pembrokeshire Triptych’ is one such piece. Some of the later poems are dazzling and gently humorous in their depiction of human interaction and personal connections. ‘Climbing my Father’ presents a child’s viewpoint of the larger-than-life aspect of the parent through touch and physical protection. A similar feeling is captured in the observance of her mother in 'Cleopatra in Cardiff’, and in ‘Pelts’, a sensual poem about a young woman’s strewn garments: ‘They smelt of Yardley lipstick and Silk Cut. They slipped from her hands, loose as leopards, with a slither into the basket.’ Ghosts is a balanced and lively collection. Wigley hasn’t wasted words in any of these poems and yet has kept a flow of text which is gentle and whole in each one. A very highly recommended read for both poetry and nature lovers.