"Made Strange By Time"

It was a great delight earlier this week to at last get a copy of "Made Strange By Time", the first poetry collection by my friend and Catchword colleague Derek Healy. I've followed its genesis and maturation with great interest and it's lovely to have the finished product to read at leisure. As a reviewer comments, the poems demand repeated reading; there are subtle layers of meaning in seemingly simple lines, lines that owe much to Derek's deft use of the traditional poetic forms which he particularly favours.

I very much enjoy poems that evoke a strong sense of time and place, features that lead into the heart of the subject matter. A particular favourite of mine from Derek's collection is "Weston Beach" where "... our foursome / made its camp, between the pier and Lido / spilling tea and sandwiches in the sand"; the word sketch of his mother as "... stockings off and hoisted skirt / forgetting us she'd wander down the shore" to wade out "lost in some other world beyond my grasp" draws for me such a poignant picture of a 1950s mother. Similarly, "At The Pictures" conjures up so well the tortured memories of anxious adolescent longings, unfulfilled, regretted - "... if only we'd imagined being old / one day, passing each other in the street / as strangers would, without a glance".  But not all the poems look back on the writer's "... change / from boyhood to a grown up life".  The theme of time is carried forward into a sometimes perplexing present and an uncertain future. I find it a path well worth travelling, at times gently comic, sometimes surprising and always thought-provoking.

Available via the Matador website at £6.99