Snow Child
by Abegail Morley
£8.99 (pub. 2011)

Snow Child Reviews

"[Abegail Morley has] a talent for the cool, long-lined lyric. Snow Child, her second collection, is rife with the viscerally felt modulations of a mind ill at ease"

Times Literary Supplement

"Abegail Morley's Snow Child gifts us bold, unflinching, memorable poems, dazzling in their precision and clarity. This is a poet who faces life's wonders, complexities and losses head-on, and invites us on a lyrical journey which will, at times, take our breath away."

Catherine Smith, 'Next Generation' poet, author of 'The New Bride', 'The Butcher's Hands', 'Lip' (Smith Doorstep) and 'The Biting Point' (Speechbubble).

"At the heart of Abegail Morley's powerful second collection is a deep sense of loss. The poems work at countering that loss with tangible visceral images that both disturb and sing with their own gorgeousness. Morley has captured just what it feels like to be living inside a skin so thin, the sun burns right through in all its lucid glory."

Helen Ivory, 'The Breakfast Machine' (Bloodaxe Books)

"Intensely personal poems of love, desertion, obsession, written with great skill and delicacy yet with a disturbing sparsity and uncanny detachment. Snow Child is a captivating and impressive collection."

Malcolm Carson, poet, editor of Other Poetry

Cellar

At the back of the cellar jam jars line the wall,
sometimes I see hands move against the glass,

wipe the inside and two eyes squint,
their lashes pulling up and down,

bubbles skating to the rim.
I don't know who screwed the lids on –

they run with rust in autumn
and when I hold them my hands corrode,

taste of metal. On the lid Peaches
in blue ink streaks across it, done in a rush

in a steaming kitchen. Now, in summer, it dries
itself, rises up then lies down for winter.

In spring the jar needs a shake to break
the ice. I turn it upside down like a snow globe

and eyes and fingers collide in the syrup.

(from Snow Child)