Glass Aisle

"e;In this virtuoso collection, Paul Henry, poacher-like, tracks the journeys of the heart through landscape, love and loss. He takes his place as one of the most important Welsh poets now writing."e; - Carol Ann Duffy "e;This haunting, elegaic collection, about music, and made of music, leaves a reader's mind full of phrases, in both senses - verbal, and tonal - and exactitudes that catch and lodge in the memory."e; - Gillian Clarke From the sea of the poet's childhood to the stillness of a canal walked in middle age, The Glass Aisle moves between rage and stillness, past and present, music and silence. In the book's title poem, a telephone engineer repairs a line that crosses a canal to the site of an old workhouse. Tormented by the voices of former "e;inmates"e;, he unwittingly connects the centuries, setting free the Victorian ghosts of poacher John Moonlight, lone parent Mary Thomas, and a host of others who haunt the poem's present-day walker. Elsewhere in this moving collection, love poems, elegies and familiar coastline "e;visitors"e;, Brown Helen, Catrin Sands define a nineteen-sixties childhood; a long poem, 'The Hesitant Song', "e;orchestrates silence"e; while playing "e;the sea's soft pedal"e; to convey the loss of a mother's songs. Lyrical and humane in its observations, The Glass Aisle is rich in the hallmarks readers have come to admire in Henry's poetry.