The Glass Aisle

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From the sea of the poet's childhood to the stillness of a canal walked in middle age, The Glass Aisle moves between rage and stillness, past and present, music and silence. In the book's title poem, a telephone engineer repairs a line that crosses a canal to the site of an old workhouse. Tormented by the voices of former "inmates", he unwittingly connects the centuries, setting free the Victorian ghosts of poacher John Moonlight, lone parent Mary Thomas, and a host of others who haunt the poem's present-day walker. Elsewhere in this moving collection, love poems, elegies and familiar coastline "visitors", Brown Helen, Catrin Sands… define a nineteen-sixties childhood; a long poem, 'The Hesitant Song', "orchestrates silence" while playing "the sea's soft pedal" to convey the loss of a mother's songs. Lyrical and humane in its observations, The Glass Aisle is rich in the hallmarks readers have come to admire in Henry's poetry.