Yvonne Baker - Böcker

From its tentative first word (‘perhaps’) to the final phrase, realising ‘here is no journey / only attending to stones— / like a story told yet again / by an old friend’, the reader is immersed in a woodland that is alive with quiet yet profound epiphanies—the way we live and die; the way we might weave narratives that change our stories. In this liminal place, which is both a real woodland and an internal space, we learn that ‘What matters is the silence that encircles you...’ And we find in that silence a liturgy of the natural world we too often forget we are part of.

In this prize-winning, lyrical debut full collection, we encounter poetry that is both delicate and powerful. Yvonne Baker writes in the liminal space between the interior and exterior world, illuminating both with grace and precision.What it means to belong, how memory constitutes us, how identity shifts and weaves, how we live in an uncertain world with authenticity and without giving up hope—these themes thread together lucid moments and small but vital epiphanies. And even at their most interior, these moments are embodied, we sense the person of another creature, we feel the weight of ‘plastic babies’, cup in our hands the porcelain of a pot that holds more than air, hear ‘the clink of stone and shell’ on a shingle beach, sit by a washing machine and weep and feel the ‘roots / yellow as old bones, / shift in darkness, undeterred.’Haunted and haunting, Love Haunts in Shades of Blue, conjures the fragility of past and future, but like the ‘Bristlecone Pine’ offers the faith that ‘… the heartwood, linking root to trunk, / will be enough to sustain you.’

Tonally beautiful with a quality that bridges exterior and interior worlds, Light Still, Light Turning is full of exquisite phrases and lucid images. Shifting with ease from lyrical narrative poems to contemplative pieces that never become abstract, Yvonne Baker writes with a light touch, that belies the skill and control at work in every poem. There is not a false note here. Form and content support one another and we are immersed in a world that aches and delights and carries us on its rhythms of loss and love and its bittersweet acknowledgment of change. This is a finely-honed collection, at once elegant and searching.

As the global ecological crises deepens, fire and water, elements that bring warmth, life, become increasingly threatening as we hold our breath, the earth burning and drowning. In Becoming Wetland Yvonne Baker dives into the existential menace of a world whose waters have lost rhythm and balance. But we are never in the realm of the didactic. This watery world is one of sorrow and questions, of images so precise and clear we feel them as our own. With her gift for making connections, between heart and world, between events and objects that could go unnoticed and the ripples of their impact, Yvonne Baker skilfully takes us ‘into the waters / of the reedbed as it sinks into darkness’ where we find the lost objects of ordinary, inundated lives. And in a central sequence we move forward through time, looking back on ourselves through the eyes of those still to be born to find, ‘a reminder of the years when we still had hope.’ But back in the present, that hope has not failed, if only we will listen and accept the blessing on those of us, all of us, ‘caught / between the ochre heat, the black rain.’ Timely, poignant and beautiful, from a poet whose writing warns, comforts and invites us to feel deeply.