Cultured Llama

We are delighted with Lyn Greenwood’s review of Flood by Jessica Mookherjee, on MsLexia Max.

Pleasure begins with touch for this slim volume of poetry by Jessica Mookherjee. The matt laminate cover feels velvety and cool: the colours and design are calm and simple – a book to travel with you.

Taking advice from another reviewer quoted on the back cover, I first read Flood in one sitting, whilst turning the corners to signal a reread for each poem that intrigued me. The number of bent edges increased through the book and I had a sense of progression through a life, a wholeness which may not have appeared had I dipped in and out of the poems. But when revisited more slowly and individually these poems show more depth and meaning than at first may be apparent […]

… this is not a ‘domestic’ collection by any means: there are also gods, the Holocaust and Grenfell. Structure is important, sometimes with repeated lines urging us to look again with different eyes at what she shows us (Growing up in Nightclubs). Most of the poems fit to a page, but some are longer and one (The Thirst) is printed sideways: I’m not sure why, though it spoke to me of the power and the seduction of paranoia and shared history, the way events can appear so different and so true when seen from another’s point of view.

This is part of the joy of Jessica’s poetry: she shows you what you think you know, places you may have been, and then twists the viewpoint so you look again and see something new and strange. Her poems are windows onto scenes ranging from the UK to India and the Pleiades; from now back to the painting of the Lascaux Caves, via 1967 and Taliesin. They are both personal and universal and I hope we will hear a lot more from this strong and thoughtful poet.

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