Rope of Sand by Fiona Larkin

In a compelling, nuanced debut, Fiona Larkin scrutinises instability and asks what we hold onto, and what we let go. Her poems, delicate and tough, consider the shifting relationships in couples, between parent and child, how a friendship is formed and broken. She searches for those languages and registers we remember, and how we might lose them, and the place of the spiritual when faith, like the tide, recedes. Sand is always equivocal, unreliable, offering “the beach, born again” even though “saltwater/erases all my/shell cathedrals.” Marine snow “fragments into residue, falls / into granular memory,” and the self is “unleashed” as skin-cells in motes of dust. Rope of Sand, in its subtle lyricism and formal accomplishment, finds a consolatory beauty in transience.

Pindrop Press