No Good

In summer when I picked dandelionsfor the geriatric guinea pig I changed the world.I killed a weed. I filled a mouth with gold.In this debut poetry collection, Sophie van Waardenberg considers girlhood and grief, love and its loss, distance and the return home, including at its heart a sequence of emotionally raw ‘Cremation Sonnets’. In its essence, this collection is the poet exploring ‘goodness’: ‘I am unbegrudging. I am the openest pair of arms’, she tells us. ‘I am a large dirty lake, a tepid naughty heart.’ I cannot accept this ending. I have fallenfrom the highest ledge. I will never land.So what if I am safe? I am not.