Other Beasts differs from Sarah Corbett's earlier work in that in the latter half of this collection of poems, she moves away from her own personal history and focuses on in-depth and often scary narratives of other lives.

Mae'r gyfrol hon o gerddi yn wahanol i gasgliadau cynharach o waith Sarah Corbett am ei bod hi, yn ail hanner y casgliad, yn symud oddi wrth ei hanes hi'i hun ac yn edrych mewn manylder ar droeon digon brawychus, weithiau, ym mywydau pobl eraill.

Sarah Corbett’s first collection of poems, The Red Wardrobe, appeared in 1998 and was nominated for the Forward First Collection and the T.S. Eliot Prize. It was followed by The Witch Bag in 2002 and, in 2006, a selection of her translations of the Dutch poet Mustafa Stitou (Uit Het Hoofd/By Heart). This new collection has all the hallmarks of a fine poet truly coming into her own, exploring her themes in a distinctive voice that is at once powerful and tender.

The images are striking – the sky unleashing ‘the long whip/of its mountains, its river’s black ribbons’; Hale-Bopp as ‘a fist of flung glitter’; a mountain village at night, hanging ‘like a lantern/in some unnamed crevice of the hills’. Light and darkness – natural, artificial and metaphorical – recur. ‘Many times I’d weighed you against other lovers, like handfuls of soil/equally dark and rough.’ Colour and sound speak together, as in ‘the clap of my brown shoes on green lino’. The rhythms and structures are sometimes gut-wrenchingly perfect (the finest example is in ‘Fox at Midnight’, between the second and third stanzas – read it and see).

Boundaries, borders and divisions; uniqueness and unity; intimacy and distance – whether she is contemplating our relationships with each other, with animals and the natural world, with our ancestors, or with space and time, Corbett conveys the aching sense of being both a part of and apart from, perhaps most tenderly in these lines from ‘Rainbow’: ‘When you left me, turning to the wall for sleep,/I smoothed the skin of your small tanned back.’

The themes are deeply personal, but they are also political and universal, and the entire collection is suffused with a sense of the smallness and greatness of all things. This is a slim volume of short poems spoken in a soft voice. They are, quite simply, shamanic.

Suzy Ceulan Hughes

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