Heartland

Michele Leggott’s new book of poetry follows on from her 2009 collection, Mirabile Dictu, in its exploration of light and of gathering dark. Leggott is a poet of the lilting, shining moment and in five of the sections here we follow her through her own moments and movements – to Devonport, to Australia, to the north – though these sequences also reverberate with the stories and histories of others. The final two sections take this exploration of character and narrative further as in one we see off a soldier – shadowed by Leggott – to the First World War; and in the other – set in an earlier, unspecified time charted for us by telegraphic weather reports – a family tragedy unfolds, until a body is finally brought home for burial. Previously a poet to whom layout was crucial, the book includes the last poems Michele wrote that she was able to see the shapes of on the page, and thus Heartland gestures back towards previous work while at the same time beginning to chart a new compositional method. Heartland, Leggott says, is ‘a destination and a song, a shadow and a single word with two chambers’.