The poems in Anne-Marie Fyfe’s new poetry collection, House of Small Absences, invite us to a number of beautifully rendered yet unsettling places, often inspired by her travels abroad. She carefully captures a setting with all of its colour and detail, but also evokes the spirits of a place, the past or future inhabitants, their various losses and their movements through time.
Anne-Marie Fyfe’s poems have long dwelt on the role that the spaces we inhabit, the places in which we find security, play in our lives: House of Small Absences is an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces - a deserted stage-set, our own personalised ‘museum’, a Piedmont albergo, underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage - the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life’s exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go.