Love Shanty by Sadie Maskery

 

Love Shanty is the latest collection from Sadie Maskery. These are poems about love and friends, myths and family. Several poems feature her late father. Retirement Poems 1 -5 being well observed short scenes from a life, shot through both with humour and poignancy. The longer Dad ends: 

I can't remember the last time

You carried me on your shoulders

Or the last time you had strength 

To walk the hills you loved so much ....

 I think that soon you will reach a crest

Gaze beyond it to where I cannot see

And there will be the last hill 

Save some ice-cream for me. 

In A Nice Cup of Tea, realising that her husband has died, the narrator watches the boiling kettle as: 

The steam curled across the worktop 

and disappeared. Where does it go

I wondered. 

 

There is also the lesser grief of unrequited love too, in See Kay Won, in which the narrator gives a boy a bottle of the same scent she wears herself and hopes he will find her through scent alone. But humans aren't really attuned to scent in the same way as dogs, and there are several canine characters in this collection. My favourite poem here, indeed, features that relative of the domestic dog, the wolf. How to Sing with Wolves presents the wolves' song as "a tapestry of mingled scents, / intents, power and hierarchy" with a "chord / of puppies sleeping in a tumbled mass of warmth".

 

Elsewhere, there is the title poem, a love poem to the rhythm of a sea shanty; the amusing O Let Me Be a Chef on TV (which surely needs to be read out on TV by Nigella Lawson) and memorable lines and phrases, such as "The haunting of sunshine" (from Stay Out of the Sun) and "Tragic poets clutter up the shoreline" (from Selkie).

This is an excellent collection, beautifully presented with a cover photo of the Bass Rock off the coast of East Lothian.

Love Shanty by Sadie Maskery, published (2023) by Mariscat Press.

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You can read my review of Sadie's earlier poetry collection Shouting at Crows here.