Product Description
The Horizon Shifts Sideways has arisen out of the poet’s deep engagement with the observed world. Her work displays an informed curiosity about the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it – both human and animal. With unflinching candour, it explores and challenges the ways in which our preconceptions, prejudices, memories, and self-deceptions shape our worldviews.
What a delight these poems are: various, personal; full of incident, observation, visual and tactile sensitivity, intelligent comment. The lines unfold in an easy inevitability which makes one, to quote Thompson, ‘contemplate your place / in the natural order of things’. Irish poet Eavan Boland regards a poem as ‘a forceful engagement between a life and a language’. This rings true for Alison Thompson’s work.
Brook Emery
The Horizon Shifts Sideways Is exactly what you’d expect from a Thompson book: it is seductively spot on. She does, as she says, tell you about the ‘unshakeable terrain’ of things. They become in her sure voice the whole arc of death and life, the touch and pulse of the land and its creatures.
Chris Mansell
