Little Silver

British poet Jane Griffiths’ sixth collection, Little Silver, offers the riches you might expect from a former bookbinder and Oxford English Dictionary lexicographer turned painter, silversmith, and John Skelton scholar.

Clear-eyed lyrics move through shifting perspectives, holding us in moments of narrative tension that evolve into lyric reflection. In “Inscape,” we see through the eyes of the victim of a mining accident: 

feeling himself suddenly very small
and divided, one eye as it was, level 

with the choughs, taking in the bracken’s
rusty cut and thrust, the dazzling elisions 
of sea and sky where he whistled out of tune

the way he’d done since time immemorial,
the other up against the granite—the mica,
the seams and grain of it, and the scars?

In the chilling and suspenseful “The Drowning at Porthcurno,” Griffiths sets a girl in the distance in the moment when pleasure appears to turn toward tragedy: “there’s an undertow, so she dances on / the spot and the breakers turn & turn her and though / she still smiles she is going under, toes dragged in […]” 

How do we make sense of beauty inspired by terrifying human experience? In “The Amortals,” two imaginary children, Flora and Miles, the subjects of their mother’s art, “have discovered perspective” and wonder what life was like before they existed. But first:

Today Flora and Miles are learning about war—
how it happens in other places 
               over the water,

how people put out to sea in little boats
under a flag-like blue and gold sky
               of stars.

The innocence of this painterly image erupts into language like “unbombites” and “unexplosions,” as one child endeavors to understand war, while the other makes plans for their survival.

The question “Where are the children?” repeats in “Lifelines,” a rich collage of inheritances—from bloodlines traced in photographs and stories of lost siblings, to creative endeavors. The poem is itself a lifeline, as the childless speaker asserts: 

No, no children, but sentences and findings,
[…]
No, no children.
                                       No, it is not a grief—
or only as a pot contains the negative of itself.