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.’