Restorations

"No poet I know writes about art with such an intense feeling for its materiality, for smells and texture as well as nuances of colour. If a poem is like a picture, these are history paintings, rich in human detail and many-layered in their brushwork." – Matthew Francis"Hudis honours painters, plant collectors and patients who hear 'morse in the water pipes' by lovingly restoring stories from remembered fragmants. These poems are a masterclass in how to allow the energy at the centre of each poem to open like a concertina until we are engulfed by 'a whitewash of song'." – Samantha Wynne-RhydderchRestorations is the vibrant new collection by Rosalind Hudis. The book is a journey into what it means to preserve: a monument, a moment, a life-story, a poppy. It's about the hunger to possess and the need to let go. Written in the voice or guise of the art-restorer, the poems are precise in their observations and meticulous about recovering memories, building their surfaces up carefully with layers of thoughts and images.Welding themes from art and history with the contemporary, there are poems about pigments and dictators, glue, glass houses, collections, seed, crinolines and barometers, memory itself. The collection roams through these subjects, and others, exploring how they mourn, or celebrate, or distort, or resist, the mutability of experience within the physical universe.Because change is always temporal, time is also at the heart of this tension. Entwined, is a more personal story about the loss of a parent to dementia. Also running through, is a theme of women eroding the straitjacket of gendered roles: we meet a variety of characters like the explorer, Isabel Bird, and the nineteenth century navigator Sarah Jane Rees (Cranogwen). Linking all is a play with colour, particularly blue, in all its stages from vital to decayed.