Rosa Campbell’s Snacks for the Road debuts a
brilliant new voice in poetry. Sincere, irreverent, hopeful – Campbell’s
poems pull off the difficult task of speaking tenderly in an era of ironic
posturing. The poems feel excited, as if unable to catch their
breath amid the flurry of arousals and doubts they channel. Campbell makes hay
from the wayward train thought, the shapeless daydream, the dead-end: her poems
reveal a world that is erotic and laughable, queer and holy, ‘vulgar as
strawberries’. The anxiety of needing language to describe the insufficiency of
language, its failures, even its harms, is one tension that binds the poems in
this book. But so too is a soft spot for human rubbishness, and with that
a rare friendliness. You are welcome here, the poems seem to say, both to their
author and to us: ‘we’re here & making something of ourselves in the bright
light’.