Deliberate Sunshine by Jean Taylor

 

Jean Taylor is an Edinburgh based poet, who comes along to one of the writing groups I facilitate. She's very modest about her talents and I hadn't realised she had written this book, until I found a copy in the free poetry library in the Diggers Pub (an Edinburgh pub that has a poet in residence and regular poetry events). So I read a few of the poems and then returned the book to the free poetry library. Once I got home, I ordered my own copy from the publisher, Black Agnes Press, a small poetry press based in Dunbar, East Lothian. 

This is a book of poetry about family, grief and growing up, written with an eye for telling detail and the beauty of nature. The title Deliberate Sunlight comes from a phrase in the short poem Solar.

Sibling relationships are explored in Sibling Rivalry Shadorma and from a genetic point of view in Genetic Variations, which looks at inheritance of characteristics within the narrator's family. Too Short a Date (subtitled Letter to a Sister) is full of a shared enthusiasm for flowers, many of which hold specific family memories: 

Germander Speedwells
like tiny blue stars - for me, their petals
hold our mother, young and slender
through her warm summer days.

Summer Blood details the narrator having her first period on a beach holiday, describing the "summer rowan redness" and ending with her "practising for the possibility of being a woman."

A visit to Newington Graveyard, 14 January, 2019 meditates on some of the gravestones, including "a fallen angel, nose in the air", while "long brushed / foxes appear and eyeing me, disappear". 

Several of the poems in the collection focus on the grief of losing a loved one, with Mayday perfectly capturing the sense of disorientation: 

Living without him is like flying
without instruments
towards an unlit airstrip
in a remote landscape. 

The collection aptly (for a book called Deliberate Sunshine) ends with the image of daffodils, bought for:

the joy
of watching them
becoming sunlight.

Hope and the beauty of nature shining through grief.

 

Deliberate Sunshine by Jean Taylor, published (2019) by Black Agnes Press.