Reviews of Pat Earnshaw's books

Virtual Eden, 2008

Harold S. Webster, Pulsar, Sept. 2008:

To fully appreciate this little book, one needs to put aside a few grown-up attitudes about imagery. An eight-year-old child knows that inanimate objects like tombstones and dark rooms actually can and do talk to us. We can and in fact often do slip into reveries and revisit past experiences and become true artists, invisible observers of others' and of our own behaviours. The book is a gathering of poignant reflections that transport the poet back to another time within her childhood. The memories are as beautiful as they are painful, but they do not always describe an Eden. My favourite poem, and one I think that must be absorbed before reading the rest, is 'Dredging for Memories' which prepares the reader for what is to come: "Lost in a wilderness of fantasy / mismatched with memory / I tuck myself into a crevice/ underneath the torrent / of a waterfall, and safe from ambush,/ and content to watch the world . . "

Sue Butler, Happenstance - Sphinx 9, 2008:

Someone whose name I can't recall said reading Chekov was reading about yourself. That's the feeling I got as I started to red 'Virtual Eden'. The drunk rector in 'Buried' reminded me of the priest at my friend's wedding who pronounced her fiancé and herself man and wife when she alone had said the vows and 'I do'. The flies in the room where a corpse is laid out brought to mind a wooden church on Russia, an old woman sitting in a shaft of sunlight by an open coffin and swallows darting through the eaves catching flies.

Virtual Eden is a series of vivid cameos that trace elements of the author's life between the ages of one and eight. As far as possible they're told from a child's-eye view and are concerned with those things that affect, intrigue or disturb children, as in 'Doing Joined-up':

         In half a year I will be five. My brother's learning
         how to do joined-up. He makes the letters hold
         each other's hands and dance.

Earnshaw is an authority on antique lace and many of these poems are as intricately crafted as that fabric. They weave their way through her childhood - school, her father's suicide, time spent in hospital. In 'Scrying Bowl' she watches her parents together:

         In the big bed bare shoulders rise
         and fall, moulding the sheets, hiding
         the legs and feet. A head is buried
         in the softness of my mother's pillow.

These poems have an understated honesty that I really liked.

Perhaps my concern is that, like antique lace, these poems and the narrative they create won't be seen as fashionable enough for our hectic, sensation-seeking modern times. Though my mother, reading this over my shoulder, has just commented (with a glance at my jeans and jumper bought in a car boot sale) that what I know about fashion could be written on the back of a postage stamp and still leave space.

I have my fingers tightly crossed that I'm proved wrong.