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Night Lightning

Julia Casterton
The Rialto. £8.50

Julia Casterton, who died early last year, was well-known to Ambit readers, having published poetry and reviews in the magazine for several years. She was also a highly-respected teacher of creative writing and her book on the subject went through a number of editions. Night Lightning is a posthumously-published collection of her poems and the long list of subscribers at the back of the book points to the affection with which she was regarded by many people.

She was essentially a quiet poet, often dealing with what are referred to as domestic subjects:

My daughter is six.
She swims like a collie dog
hands smacking the ruffled surface
neck straining backwards

However, this focus on the family, the personal, and what I suppose some people would term the interior life, doesn’t say it all about the poetry. The following lines should indicate how alert Julia Casterton was to the outer world:

Sun turning to the old drinkwater, beach empty,
or full, rather, of its old inhabitants.
Sandpipers, gulls, the first silent
on their little legs, the second
a late-August symphony of complaint
above the silvery baby shoals that now run
more alive in a stream that’s opening slowly
over an unwatched mystery of glowing sand.

There are also passing references to politics (“This is the mysterious time / that capitalism knows nothing whatever about”) and history, with the Levellers mentioned and Chernobyl brought into one poem. I’m not suggesting that she was in any way a social or political poet but simply someone who didn’t want to live in an ivory tower, even if it is the lyrical and personal tone of the poems that comes to the fore.

Night Lightning mixes early and late poems and also contains a group of provocative prose poems. It was sad that Julia Casterton died when she was so young and seemed to be approaching a creative peak in her writing, but this final collection is a tribute to her skill and humanity.

Jim Burns
This review is taken from issue 192

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