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Jane Draycott: The Kingdom• Ian Pople: Spillway: New and Selected Poems • Ruth Sharman: Rain Tree • Claire Booker: A Pocketful of Chalk

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Jane Draycott’s The Kingdom reviewed by Kathleen Bell

The Kingdom by Jane Draycott. £11.99. Carcanet. ISBN: 978 1 800017 259 3

In a world so recently familiar with grieving and isolation, and alert to the dangers of environmental disaster, Jane Draycott’s poems in The Kingdom conjure a territory that hovers just on the edge of experiences we might recognise, offering us a half-familiar sense of strangeness and estrangement. For example, a message of longing in ‘Wyldernesse’ announces:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI have entered
a new wilderness, – randomly generated
ravines, sunless abysses in the heart
of the financial sector, sirens throughout –
xxxxxxxxxxand am alone.
. . . . . .
I have asked the few strangers I meet
which way…