A Touch on the Remote
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‘Does space exist?’ asks the poet, whose new title suggests the startling image of a poem as a remote control: ‘If a poem could make the crossing / between thought and life…’ In the title sequence she seeks ways of touching an absent son ‘across the latitudes / and lapse of years’. These poems lie at the core of a psychological journey, which starts in the opening section with landscapes of feeling, friendship, loss. Images of remoteness recur: a climber lost in a blizzard; estranged lovers; the stars. The last section brings to life an imaginary sculptor in stone, with an eye ‘blue as the distance’, who chisels ‘his slow passage through the underworld’. But always distance is bridged, and earthed, by the grip of hands, by the immediacy of the felt world, and by the reach of the imagination.
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‘Does space exist?’ asks the poet, whose new title suggests the startling image of a poem as a remote control: ‘If a poem could make the crossing / between thought and life…’ In the title sequence she seeks ways of touching an absent son ‘across the latitudes / and lapse of years’. These poems lie at the core of a psychological journey, which starts in the opening section with landscapes of feeling, friendship, loss. Images of remoteness recur: a climber lost in a blizzard; estranged lovers; the stars. The last section brings to life an imaginary sculptor in stone, with an eye ‘blue as the distance’, who chisels ‘his slow passage through the underworld’. But always distance is bridged, and earthed, by the grip of hands, by the immediacy of the felt world, and by the reach of the imagination.
A Touch on the Remote
The early light has not yet touched even
the near shores of that sleeping continent
where my son lives in the future.
When it dawns, he’ll cross the grass to swim
in an ornamental lake among giant tadpoles
while toads crouch under boulders of quartz.
Later, the fridge snorts ice into his smoothie,
the vacuum comes to heel at a touch on the remote.
Everything is possible until the power fails.
In a brown-out, substance and shadow interbreed,
clothes flag in the dryer, the air smells obsolete.
In black-out, the deep freeze relaxes –
there’ll be no need in downtown bars to buy
silence on the juke box, and the lake will unfurl
a shock of stars. He vanishes from our video chat,
to return in pixels of shattered memory,
crossing time zones in a synaptic stutter,
streamed back to me from the future.
Published: 08 April 2016
ISBN: 978-1-905208-34-0
Pages: 68
“Everywhere the power of experience emerges in the nuances of seeing, focused observations that combine openness and immersion. Saunders shows the world cherished by our watchfulness, life lived in rapt attention.”
Carrie Etter
“… poems whose marvellous collective effect is simultaneously to quieten and energise the mind.”
Lesley Saunders
“quiet, cool, unshowy … There are no fireworks here, only “a shock of stars” and “pixels of shattered memory” […] The strongest poems in the first section … move beyond description of landscape and weather into profound explorations of time and memory.”
ARTEMISpoetry
Linda Saunders started her career as an art student, then changed direction to read English at Durham University. After a spell in the U.S., where her first son was born, she returned to Durham and taught literature courses for the Extra Mural department and the W.E.A. Later, her love of art and words came together in a career as a fine-arts journalist and editor; she was short-listed for the BP Arts Journalist of the Year award. Her poetry has been widely published in magazines and anthologies, including New Women Poets from Bloodaxe Books. A Touch on the Remote is her fourth book. Her first full-length collection, from Arrowhead Press, was short-listed for the Jerwood/Aldeburgh Prize. She now lives in Bath.
