COUNTING RAIN

“Karen Dennison’s first collection, Counting Rain, is a quiet and moving series of poems, in which the most recurrent theme is the loss of childhood, and the way it lodges in the memory. ‘Here’ she writes, ‘are the rooms of our childhood,/ the walls where we wrote our names.’ This is a skilful, perfectly disarming series of pieces, in which disquiet and tension lie just beneath the surface, held there carefully while the writer investigates moments of loss, love, discovery – the whole collection is like a stealthy and imaginative search for the way the past and present impact upon one another. Its timing and its imagery are exceptionally exact: this is a life that we recognise, in which the writer uses her own experience to make us think about our own. It’s wonderful – a genuine journey, trodden and re-trodden, one that’s a privilege to share.”

Bill Greenwell

“Karen Dennison’s poems explore both the vastness of space and the intimacy of what passes between people in the cycle of birth, death, and what happens in between. She has a scientist’s concern for precision, but a poet’s ear for lyric. Her poems are direct and powerfully emotional in their desire to seek a pattern in chaos and to wake the ghosts of memory. An exciting debut.”

Tamar Yoseloff

“Dennison’s poems bristle with disquiet and transformation. Her images leap off the page and look you right in the eye.”  

Helen Ivory

Leaving

I left the safety of your arms
for the vacuum of outer space.

I looked back to see you mouthing
like a fish. I couldn't read your lips.

My blood did not boil but
seethed beneath the skin.

My hands swelled, filling
the space left by yours.

I stared into the sun.
The last thing I remember, tears
were simmering in my eyes and your name

had boiled on my tongue.

Releasing You

I wind and wind, feel the pressure build.
The key-hole is empty, its key long lost.
Ivory paint is chipped off pale wood,
but the red rose is perfectly furled.
Opening the lid, your eyes are my eyes.

A ballerina in a skirt of dusty net
jerks to life; her clockwork pirouette
leads me to a dressing table, a sunlit bed,
stories of brooches, pearls, and rings.
I lift the velvet tray, watch the spool spin;
its spikes pluck the teeth of a silver comb
playing Für Elise in doll’s house notes.

Lowering the lid, I catch your scent,
breathe you in, and out again.

Guilt

She wrapped her guilt in silk, buried it
in hard earth. Each slicing of the spade
jarred her bones. She dragged a concrete slab,
piled up bricks on top. She scattered flowers
to hide the smell; no fox would dig up
her shame. She tended the plot every day,
speaking to herself. Finally, she stopped;

brushed off wilted roses, un-piled the bricks
and removed the stone, let weeds grow
from remorse. Years later she unearths
a lacework of roots, tattered scraps of silk
and bones of forgiveness.