Brushstrokes Thirty Poems

Kate Rose’s poetry is influenced by rural south-west France, where she has lived for the past 10 years. She finds the countryside a place of contrasts: of loneliness, death and destruction but also of kindness and hope. The desperate protagonists in ‘Golden Cow’, who fail to provide comfort to the mother of the dead calf. The cabbage whites and ryegrass in ‘Disappearance’ are discordant with the despair of the tractor driver. Yet the neighbour in ‘Below the mountains’, despite hardships, provides hope in her gift of cheese; the walker in ‘Voice’ rekindles a precious friendship she thought long gone.

Kate uses seascapes, cities, the countryside as the settings for her poems. Her descriptions use few words, yet enable the clear visualisation of the woods, seasons, light, the colour of the sea. It is in these places that she explores her key themes. In the ghostly ‘Transient’, shadows play tricks on the mind. Trauma is personified in ‘Shadow’ as it stalks the narrator. Kate explores estranged families in ‘Bloods ties’ and ‘Being Fred’, contrasting the cruelty of one boy with the new consciousness of the other, both poems filmic in their images. In ‘When it’s time to go’, she uses a walk in the woods to explore loneliness and loss. In ‘Fortified’ she distinguishes between the damp of Leeds and an amber bay, to reveal the longing of a lonely traveller.

Images and sensory details permeate her work. In ‘Garlic and Roast Tomatoes’, the football thumping against the ancient walls of Santa Croce in Florence provides a sense of normality and light to the lovers in the cold church.

Yet in the darkest of places, we find hope. The snowberries revitalising a love affair in ‘Propagating’. Her tender poem ‘Study’ showing us a young daughter’s observations of her father’s anxiety. The children’s singing in ‘Aftermath’.

Reading Kate’s poems forces readers to confront the very nature of their being. Memories, broken dreams, abandoned plans which they might choose to forget in their busy lives. Yet here she gently and persuasively helps her readers to reconnect the positives of their past to shape their futures.