The Tall Golden Minute by Linda Saunders’ is an enchanting collection – a pleasure to hold and to read.
Throughout, there is a sense of the in-between and the underlying. ‘His Distance’ is an example of this as the narrator, observing a man asleep on a train, is aware of ‘another rhythm’ beneath the train’s ‘rumble and sway’, an encompassing rhythm that is like ‘summer migrant’ birds or the wind ‘breathing softly’ in the trees. ‘Spirit Guide’ is set in the subtle passage of time ‘Between twilight and dusk’ while ‘The Skeleton Houses’ focuses on traces left from the past and traces left for the future. All things seem to be trembling ‘in the moment’s balance/on an edge, / the between of summer and winter.’ (‘Almost’).
There are many encounters in The Tall Golden Minute, either face to face between people or between an observer and the observed. The passenger on the train in the first poem is ‘both grand and vulnerable’ as he takes the reserved seat for himself, opens his laptop, plugs in his phone and then proceeds to fall asleep for the whole journey, possibly ‘all the way to the terminus, and beyond.’ Keith the joiner, in ‘Handyman’ has a ‘new-moon-on-its-back’ grin as he mends the door and ‘zippers the wind’. My favourite of the encounters occurs in ‘The Everlasting Flower’ where the narrator writes with affection about a couple on the bus, a young man with a blue rose tattoo on the back of his hand and his girl who is ‘as composed/as a field of ripe grain on a still day.’ The final lines of the poem are tender and poignant:
Before they’re lost to my sight, a wind
lifts her hair in farewell. I imagine
how long the rose will last; how it may
float like a dream still over the mottles
and corded veins of an old man’s hand.
Nature, in all its rich intricacies, is wonderfully described in the collection. Linda Saunders has the gift of perception for ‘the dance of seeds and birds’. (‘Now in the Dale’). Like the artist depicted in ‘Ancient Spring’, an outline is enough to reveal ‘a bird/perched on a high twig or in flight/through space’ while a few marks with a pencil create ‘a spatter of small leaves’. Rain falling on the birch tree after a month of drought is a blessing that, to the poet’s ear, creates a note on each leaf. ‘If only I could transcribe such music’, she says. (‘Bliss’).
Several of the loveliest and most fascinating poems in The Tall Golden Minute muse upon time as a ‘thought search’ and a ‘kind of listening’. The title poem introduces the theme quite early on with a description of the church clock which, ‘for all time’, has its hands set ‘at midnight or noon’ while the Roman numerals around the face are painted ‘bright gold’. In ‘Swale Time’ the narrator has mislaid her watch, somewhere, somehow, it ‘just slipped/into mystery, hidden in spacetime,/insouciant.’ Now time-free she can lose herself in the blue of speedwell, the sandpipers probing between stones ‘for insect morsels’, a black rabbit on the path. A ‘keyhole of darkness’ perhaps, but memory is at the heart of this poetry, it ‘shimmers the happenstance of event/and feeling, like the shift of light through water.’ There is ‘always something’, says the narrator of ‘Astonishing’, something ‘about the light.’
There is a word that recurs in the poems – more than just a word, a constant and underlying theme – and that is ‘gift’. All manner of things are given – the barn owl’s wings, the swiftness of feet and freedom from lockdown for someone who has ‘not touched/anybody for six weeks’, the butterfly that flickers ‘dark/light dark/light flash-fast here-and-there/ low over grass, leafage, rock roses’.
The Tall Golden Minute is a gift of poetry. Linda Saunders gives the gift of her words to the reader, listener, bystander. ‘Everything attends’, she says, – sultry air, the tree/spellbound – to this one quickness.’ (‘Gift’).
Mandy Pannett 23rd October 2023
