Jane's Writing Shed.

'Where you start from' by Lindy Barbour. Published by Mariscat Press 2015. £6.00. The title of Lindy Barbour's first poetry pamphlet reveals the author's skill in finding just the right word or phrase and thereby implying layers of meaning in her poems. 'Where you start from' not 'I', not 'we' but 'you' which could be addressed to her brothers, to whom the collection is dedicated, her parents, her readers and/or herself. These poems exquisitely chart her early years growing up in North East Fife. The pamphlet opens with the first poem, 'First, the Garden, November 1956', 'We opened the back gate in the high wall and, entering from William Street, found you waiting,' This poem is a tender evocation of a memory of her childhood garden and as with other poems in the pamphlet, it sharply highlights the differences between adult concerns, 'That's not laurel, it's a camellia' and those of a child,

I wrote this poem last year after a delightful Suffolk holiday. Imagine watching a green woodpecker stabbing the grass in the graveyard of a medieval church....... Thinking of stardust by Crowfield Church That call, that shock of feathers, of moss and blood, behind a half-timbered church. A green woodpecker with a snake-like tongue, raked out invertebrates between the gravestones, then flew up, a mocking cry in its wake. The sound caught. What if, I thought, when a bird dies the carcass is carried off by a fox or a stoat, then partly eaten, partly left, rots and desiccates. And on a night when the atmosphere thins and the wind catches the drying skin of dead things, all those atoms are gathered up into shining skeins, particulates of wing and gristle, shifting in the solar winds? That would make dust somehow immortal.