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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