Gleam

Overview

In these 40 powerful new poems, Sarah Broom explores the effect of a life-threatening condition by way of the landscapes of the natural world, charting the hardest things in beautiful language. Broom’s forte is in encapsulating, expressing, and making sense of strong internal feeling and turmoil through metaphor, and in Gleam, her poems bring together heightened emotion, a robust sense of the physical body, and an external landscape in controlled, sinewy language. In the title poem, she charts a radiotherapy session in both physical and metaphoric terms: “there are avenues of light / and now there is a wide and open terrain, my brain / is a vast, hilly country.” This impressive collection examines basic human truths with clarity and force and will open out painful, rewarding vistas for its readers.

Reviews

“A collection profoundly attuned to human mortality in which Sarah Broom unerringly conveys the joy of the material world. In lyric nets cast at a linguistic edge between life and death, land and sea, home and the world, she expresses the pleasure we take in things we do not own. These poems uncover in a catch of breath and heart what it means to hold on—and let go.”  —Janet Charman, poet and author, Cold Snack

Author Biography

Sarah Broom lectured in English at Oxford University, England, and Otago University, New Zealand, and is the author of the poetry collection Tigers at Awhitu and the book Contemporary British and Irish Poetry.