Under the Microscope: Review of 'Slant Light' by Sarah Westcott
This work, so full of biological references, charms, voices from the natural world, is a memorable first collection. From its opening poem, ‘Bats’, which, like ‘Hare’, deals with creatures popular in contemporary poetry, Sarah Westcott’s surprising imagery, ‘wombed and jeweled / with kidneys, ovaries, / rows of studded teats.’; arresting language, ‘turning widdershins,’; and chilling, ‘…you’ll feel / our hunting song across your teeth’, sets the tone for the way she exposes similarities between humans and other animals, and reveals her keen eye and depth of scientific knowledge.
The collection is carefully composed with poems highlighting human characteristics placed beside poems which reference to animals and plants: ‘Inklings’, dealing with conception, rejoices in creation, ‘moulding them out of our hearts like clay,’, but is also visceral ‘and thighbones working like engines all greased with blood and longing,’ comes immediately after ‘Bats’.
As a non-biologist, despite the use of language such as ‘mycelium’, ‘hyaline’, and sporocarps’ (‘Downy Mildew’), I didn’t feel alienated from content, I was taken down the microscope, and pleasure in language, a playfulness in parts, ‘epithelial with a tensile foot / like a surfboard with nerves.’ (‘Form’) draws the reader into the work.
The poems deal with opposites and contrast: conception, in ‘Lily’, ‘Inklings’, and ‘Sentinel’ (concerned with chance, ‘how one seed might pierce its seamless skin, / set it dividing, tumbling into a stranger, strange as the man in the moon, the women / three-mothers-back, …’); miscarriage, in ‘Little Red’; and death in ‘The Green Flash’.
In poems which explore and reveal plant and animal life, we are taken into a wildness; whilst those written from a human perspective reveal focus on a taming of wildness, present for instance in ‘Black and Blue’, here there is a conflict between love and duty, apparent also in ‘The Faithful Couple’.
I loved ‘Lily’: in just ten lines, Sarah combines the keen observation of the botanist with the skilled use of metaphor, ‘ planting deep gold, / seeds that will root and bloom / into white lilies…’ In poems which make use of anthropomorphism, a biologist’s wonder is revealed alongside the empathy of a poet. A potent mix.
Throughout the work, there is a quest for an answer to questions about ourselves, ‘…in stars and tides, in the past and in ‘a dialogue between bar codes and desire’. [‘We are Listening’]
I’ve read three previous collections from Pavilion Press and each has been memorable for its precision, craft, and unique voice. Sarah Wescott’s collection is no exception. There is so much more I could comment on: the cover and font using harmonious shades of green – so fitting given the content; the dimensions of the collection making it so portable; the pace, tone, and form of each poem; further discussion of voice. However, there are limitations here, so I aim to just whet your appetite and recommend ‘Slant Light’.
