Borrowed Rooms

These poems, spare and nuanced, explore the borrowed rooms we inhabit in personal relationships: the temporary homes of marriage and parenting; the personas we carry for a little while and must ultimately abandon. In tight and unsentimental poems, Barbara Pelman grieves the death of a father, notes the changing dynamics of mothers and daughters, watches the doors irrevocably close on a marriage, and delights in the temporal beauty surrounding her: the simple splendour of garry oak and hawthorn, arbutus branches bent to the shape of wind, and the stutter of shoreline. The idea of a borrowed room finds expression in Pelman's deft use of form: she writes sonnets, sestinas, ghazals and glosas borrowed from ancient Persia and Renaissance Italy that surprise us with their intensity and tactile clarity. The image of a borrowed room has other implications: from the window of the unfamiliar, her perspective on the familiar changes - her poems glimpse a Zen garden of star magnolia and early daffodil, islands drifting in a new sea, the rain shining the bones of trees on the beach - a sense, finally, of home. As she tells us in the final poem, "you do not know where you are until you are there, and even then, only time seems to have moved."