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Dilys Wood
Women Come to a Death
Poetry. 1997. 57 pages. ISBN 0 904872 28 9. £6.95.
Death is both personal and political
in this remarkable collection, which begins with the magnificent long poem,
'The Death of a Safety Officer', a dialogue between the dying man and a chorus
of women, which relates the closure of the South Yorkshire pits and death of
a way of life to the old age and death of an individual miner. The
book closes with a sequence of poems where the author nurses her mother through
death from cancer. They describe the painful detail of the illness and the strange
suspension of normal life as mother and daughter spend these last
revealing months together.
'Dilys Wood's first collection
is powerful and moving.' PQR
'Wood
is good at handling strong, simple words, and she is particularly skilful
at evoking moods. She writes with a swift impressionism, tautly constructed,
exact and disciplined.' The North |
