Leonora Simonovis

The poems in Sylee Gore’s Maximum Summer, each placed in the middle of the page and framed by white space, record the passing of time in the months following the birth of the speaker’s first child. In a strong, lyrical voice, Gore delivers short, image-driven scenes that give an account of the speaker’s physical and emotional experiences as a new mother: Colostrum lacquers my journal. Night is golden morning. My pages fill with the hours you don’t sleep. My body slumps. A moment makes a day.

The Colour of Time, a debut collection by the Irish poet Úna Ní Cheallaigh, opens with the poem “Guest,” which begins: “The grey shed door has swung open / and, crazed pendulum, it beats / against the metal drainpipe.” A few lines down, we observe “the disturbed contents of two old tea chests: / telegrams, folded letters, opened, scattered, / become fragments.” Along with the “grey shed door” Cheallaigh opens, also, a door into the past and into the histories of people—especially women—whose...

In Jenny George’s After Image, “The body is not a place” and “[w]hat you think is form / is just a kind of trembling.” Together, the poems in this collection offer a poignant and unique tableau that conveys the difficulty of describing the moment when someone dies, how the body transforms, Over the hours spanning dead of night and early dawn, her face changed to a stone under the surface of a bright, transparent stream.