Histories Haunt Us

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In Triny Finlay's second collection of poetry, she asks what it means to let in the ghosts of the past. Will memories loosen the frame of a life? Will subtle fears take over? Finlay plumbs the depths of family life as she negotiates the territories of ancestry, love, and new a great-grandmother who went to bed for seventeen years; a lover caught with somebody else; a son's critical illness -- things that "encroach, they devastate, so that you must you are an anchor or you are not."Whether she is contemplating the politics of drought in Eritrea or a safari in South Africa, Finlay does not let us forget the potency of our personal and collective histories. She also explores the expansive landscape of her experience, layering a vision of her world with that of her young son, and exposing the ache of obssession, of doubt, ofsuffering. This is a fragile world, in which rivers overflow and fear can become paralysing. But there is hope here, too, for the "lusty aria" of the newborn child, for "a look we might have missed, in a different room," for the falling leaves that return to the ground, that recover us.