I’m ashamed to say I had not read Kitty Donnelly’s prize winning collection, The Impact of Limited Time (Indigo Dream Publishing, 2020), before preparing for this review. Yet I only had to read the first few poems to appreciate what I had missed and to realise that Donnelly is an exceptional talent. The collection consists of 45 poems exploring a wide range of topics. Consequently it is difficult to give the reader a flavour of it in its totality, so I’ll concentrate on what made the collection distinctive for me.

As the title suggests, Donnelly reflects upon the effects of time on our lives. The collection begins with a short poem appropriately entitled Time.  She begins, ‘So we plough each week/into a furrow of the past.’ This image of ploughing conveys a rather bleak view of life: there is no sense of rapture or pleasure here, just a grinding existence…