Tag Archives: Bloodaxe Books

Written with delicate force, Jane Griffiths’ extraordinary collection Little Silver charts the thin shimmering line between the real and the imagined, considers the shifting balance between inheritance and originality, and ponders the space left by those that were—or never were. But nothing she looks at proves to be a good sitter.

            your own path home leads only to this:

            [                        a blank space                       ]

            A little silvering between the trees.

Does she speak of home, or the self; and why is nothing to be found? Perhaps neither question is too troubling for Griffiths; there is, at least, as much serenity as there is anxiety on these pages. One reason for this, I expect, is that she seems to see that the self is as much an act of creation—something belonging to the imagination, something to be wrought with words—as anything else. The relationship between our words and who we are occurs repeatedly in Giffiths’ poems. Consider these lines, where the letter ‘I’ embodies its own meaning:

            It has been so long.

            This drift of white not a field.

            Lost in the thick of the paper

            I, a small upright.

The writer becomes her words, or becomes in her words,  again:

                                                                – her whole

            body in italics flying the gap between its wooden

            launch-pad and privet, feet angled against the sky

            whose stars she links literal-mindedly to the foot

            of her page, first tethering then cutting them loose.

How much are words make us who we are is not only a question of creation; it is just as much a genetic question, a question of ‘what you were born with’. In response to which Griffiths returns—and at times bids goodbye to—her ‘mother tongue’. She finds:

            Little Silver, a true and double passage.

            A small gift of tongues to take you out

            into the world’s roundabout ways

            and crossed purposes to talk of leaving,

            to talk of anything but –

The phrasing, rhythm, and attendant word selection are consistently very fine, but as much as Griffiths finds wonder in words and puts them to wonderful use, language and art are also tricky things to deal with. The connection between life and art is multifarious; they are not merely reflections of one another, but part of one another, and where—if ever—they do come apart, is not at all clear. Which Griffiths recognises:

                                                                                There’s no

            life without a medium – which is the thing itself, or so

            I say, living mostly through representations. Though if

            the work covers for the child, what does the child cover

            for?

The wistful but enchanted tone is characteristic. Throughout, Griffiths’ wavers between the one and the other, never quite slipping into unbridled optimism, or unrestrained despair. Though she does come close. In ‘Life Sentence’, one of many dream-tinted moments in the book, her self-directed interrogation teases toward the darker side of this scale:

            Conceivably, like that precipitate

            dream you have, most nights: stepping 

            out from multi-storey or cliff to leave

It ends:

                                                You contemplate

            this leap, the long suspension of it –

            the crown, heart cage, fledging appendix.

            That dream you have – human.

            Its inescapable living weight.

Samuel Bowerman 21^st April 2024