Desmond Graham's poems for and about his daughter Milena take us from the first sightings of an Ultrasound Scan - 'vertebrae like sweetcorn/toes a spark of light' - into the deft and learned ways of the infant: 'She is learning her hands/like a flute player/with the little finger perched/on an inch of thin air/above the last stop'. The crawling baby who looks up at the Cologne Cathedral of your knees becomes the toddler we travel and make discoveries with, who leads you into her story 'from kitchen to lounge/few words are needed, up the stairs/peer through the window/stagger your way back down'.
This, Desmond Graham's fifth collection, brings together poems written over twelve years which bear witness to a child's growth: a thank you, certainly but also, as he explains in the Author's Note, a work of 'respect and admiration'. Synchronised with the growth is an increasing awareness of the transitory place he has within it. 'Will I go with all your stories/into your childhood,left behind,/with the lost child you played/and I rescued?' The learning is two-way as the child teaches its reach of imagination, its playing out of care and companionship, and the poet learns how to let go, to be overtaken.
Milena Poems costs £7.50 and was published in 2004.
ISBN: 978-1-873226-67-4
Until recently Desmond Graham was Professor of Poetry at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, but is now a full-time writer with homes in Newcastle and Southern Germany. Flambard Press has published four themed collections by him, After Shakespeare (2001), Milena poems (2004), Heart work (2007) and The Green Parakeet (2009), as well as Two Darknesses (1994), a selection of poems by the major Polish poet Anna Kamienska that he co-translated. Graham’s poems have been widely translated into Polish and French. His is also well known as the biographer and editor of the poet Keith Douglas.
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