May Swim

by Katie Donovan

ISBN: 9781780376868

Published: 2024-08-06

By turns lyrical and sardonic, this new collection from Katie Donovan is characteristically watery - candid and uncompromising in its refusal to inhabit the safer reaches of the shore. Themes of loss, widowhood and ageing co-exist with observations of her wild garden and its inhabitants, including a mangy fox she helps to survive. Small acts of salvage are often all that is possible in the face of overwhelming odds, such as the permission given during the Covid-19 pandemic to go 2km from home. This allowed Donovan to swim at White Rock, her local beach, thus staying afloat through the fear of that brutal time and what came next - the death of her mother. In some of these new poems the comforting delusion of rescue is highlighted as a flawed but human necessity, as in the case of Ishi, the last of his tribe "saved to be / a living exhibit in a museum". Other poems give voice to the remorse that is the haunting of a failed rescue. Whether writing about her hybrid car, the death of...