Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- The Commute
- Warming
- Walking Home
- Cycling the Island
- The Garden
- Swallow Hole
- Sylvia Plath's House
- Sixteen Acres
- The Trap
- Praise Song
- View of a Badger on the Heights Road
- The Meaning of Birds
- The Ghost of a Flea
- Nest
- Twinned Sonnets
- Counting the Pennies
- Swan Upping
- The Frozen River
- Marsh Lily
- Praise Song
- To a Dandelion
- Moths
- Sestina for Rain
- A Perfect Mirror
- The Unicorn
- Praise Song
- Relics
- Getting Lost
- Woods in Snow
- Moon Walk
- Halfway Back
- New Moon
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
Getting Lost
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- The Commute
- Warming
- Walking Home
- Cycling the Island
- The Garden
- Swallow Hole
- Sylvia Plath's House
- Sixteen Acres
- The Trap
- Praise Song
- View of a Badger on the Heights Road
- The Meaning of Birds
- The Ghost of a Flea
- Nest
- Twinned Sonnets
- Counting the Pennies
- Swan Upping
- The Frozen River
- Marsh Lily
- Praise Song
- To a Dandelion
- Moths
- Sestina for Rain
- A Perfect Mirror
- The Unicorn
- Praise Song
- Relics
- Getting Lost
- Woods in Snow
- Moon Walk
- Halfway Back
- New Moon
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
Summary
Clare did it, famously: once as a child
breaking his bounds, again as an adult,
losing one half of himself to the wild.
Unbound, bound. Finding the path by chance
and once in sight, home made strange.
One winter I found the edge of moor
and kept going across grass and heather
black with months of rain until nothing
I saw for miles made sense and a huge stone
wall presaged a fall of land. I feared the earth
would crumble beneath my feet, air cartwheel
my breath and stammered heartbeats
and the only thing to do was retreat,
in the corner of my eye the shapes of clouds.
How Churn Milk Joan became standing stone
at the boundary of three towns. How
stumbling across her long back at dusk
from the wrong side I thought myself lost,
facing south not north, and almost panicked
until a light glinted on at Foster Clough.
- Type
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- Information
- A Perfect Mirror , pp. 47Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018