The Iron Bridge

by Rebecca Hurst

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 128
Rating:

Synopsis:

Rebecca Hurst's first collection bridges memory and observation, noting the detail of the natural world and our changing relation to it. The book's places are made familiar by walking. It encounters other worlds alive with new and recovered ideas and images - from the folk traditions of her Sussex childhood, to archival encounters with a nineteenth-century nurse-explorer, and her undergraduate training as a Kremlinologist. Her language is deeply rooted, as keenly aware of etymologies as of history. Shaped by myth, history and desire, the poems of The Iron Bridge are theatrical, fierce, music-infused.

Rebecca Hurst’s The Iron Bridge was a fairly random pick to use my National Poetry Library card, from one of the collections of prizewinners and shortlisted titles — a debut prize, if I recall correctly. The collection includes various poems and a few prose-poems/pieces of microfiction, some of it themed together and some of it less obviously so.

I enjoyed quite a few of the poems, and Hurst’s word choice/cadence, though I definitely preferred the poems over the prose-poems/microfiction, and I thought she was a little over-fond of the descriptor “needle-sharp” (which came up at least three times). I liked “Arrivals/Departures” a lot, in particular.

I’d try other collections by Hurst in future, definitely. Not an instant favourite, but glad I checked it out.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)