Green figs & blue jazz - Lizzie Fincham

The narrative arcs of love and loss, sex and death, with the constant interplay between time present and time past, unite this deeply affective collection from widely published and award winning poet, Lizzie Fincham. Structured in three acts, Green Figs & Blue Jazz moves from a winter solstice, gathering memories of a relationship in which the signs of transience and mortality appear in retrospect, to a central act in which loss comes to the fore so that every place, each object, even the mud on a pair of boots becomes a stark meditation on what has gone, what might have been. Finally resolving in a final act in which memory, dreams and hope conspire to remake the past and give substance to possible futures, this evocative and imagistically rich collections moves full circle, ending in "advent" with the world still waiting.

At the Feast of All Souls in Christ Church Cathedral
trumpets and sackbuts circle the nave,
seven Botticelli angels moonlight
as buskers in the courtyard of Trinity

and all the golden stars in the sky
tumble down to earth now.

(from "Hunter's Moon")