It takes a real poet to make those of us jaded by Christmas reimagine the season. Angela Graham performs the feat of translating the festival into an urgent challenge, fraught with our contemporary problems and yet full of joy. This book, with its lovely illustrations, will be used for a very long time.
Gwyneth Lewis, poet and writer, inaugural National Poet of Wales. Author of Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling, 2024 UWP https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/nightshade-mother/
In these intimate contacts with the so-very-strange tale of Christmas, Angela Graham refreshes the familiar with an array of characters and forms drawn from her own eclectic gathering of aesthetic influences – the three wise wives, the woman at the well, cards arriving for lost former inhabitants, departures of friends, innocence, languages (including Welsh, English, Ulster-Scots, Irish). Accompanied by wry and knowing linocuts by Martin Erspamer OSB, her poems enact much of the mesmeric pull of the season on young hearts, as well as the melancholic longing more jaded spirits bring to the festivities.
These are lyric poems of poignancy and some pain, alert to joy, the unexpected and the promise of better lives, more grace, greater love, even for those who accidentally encounter the wondrous, through no fault of their own – the best way to meet good poetry: “It’s fitting that the angels sang in the open countryside/but maybe someone, in the over-crowded streets nearby,/looked up and heard the stillness/when they drew breath/between each stanza of their praise.”
It is a wonderful gathering of poems … such a lightness of touch with the old tropes, so much music and energetic imagination at work, so many new notes sounded. Not a line is predictable or a thought expected…
Damian Smyth, poet and Head of Literature and Drama, Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Author of Irish Street, Templar Books https://templarpoetry.com/products/irish-street
You might think that there is nothing new to say about Christmas, yet this collection shimmers with relevance for us today.
Drawing on the world of nature, on seasonal rituals and on the nativity itself, Angela Graham brings original and re-invigorating perspectives to the Christmas story. For instance, present giving re-negotiates its commerciality when ‘we give each other presents, wrapped because/ Love always must emerge, / fresh as when we first discovered it: / shy saviour of the world.’ (‘Opening Christmas Gifts’)
Her poems give an authentic voice to many (some in an Ulster Scots, Welsh or Irish tongue), including a remarkable central sequence, Three Kings’ and their ‘Three Queens’ in their search for meaning. Caspar’s wife recalls on his deathbed how he had changed after their journey: ‘But, Caspar, you know, you must know, / that you came back more tender,/ humbler, sweeter, /wiser,/ as though you had some inner guiding star.’
A dramatic monologue that succinctly transports the nativity into today’s desperate circumstances, is spoken in the voice of a belligerent houseowner when he discovers a couple in his outhouse:
‘Not in here you’re not, I yell. But
he’s gawpin at the baby. She’s out of it.
Pack it in! The wife. From nowhere. Shift yourself,
she says to me. We gotta keep her warm.
She’s on her mobile, to Pam-I-used-to-be-a-midwife.
What’s her name? she asks the bloke
but it’s something she can’t catch so it’s love, this; love that
Love, it’s a boy. OK? You’ll be ok, love.’ (December)
Many of the poems highlight the extraordinary in the everyday. They spin a luminous thread through the dark end of the year, aware of the hardship and heaviness of heart that many encounter, yet asserting that ‘In darkness, any light is LIGHT’.
The power of this collection lies in the scope of the poet’s imagination and her ample skill to realise it on the page for the reader. The striking folkloric images by Martin Erspamer which accompany some of the poems enhance the sense of human story and ongoing quest.
STAR is aptly named, as Angela Graham’s collection shines a light on the core values of the nativity, deftly revealing “the kernel – love.’
Ruth Carr, writer, poet, editor of The Female Line and co-editor of Her Other Language, White Row http://www.whiterow.net/her-other-language.htm
In STAR Graham gives us fresh and vital takes on familiar themes, leading us through the Christmas season, illuminating dark corners, casting wonder in everyday imagery and moving us with her deft poetic repertoire.
Glen Wilson, poet, winner of the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, author of An Experience On The Tongue, Doire Press https://www.doirepress.com/writers/glen-wilson
These are warm, hopeful, delicious poems that celebrate the spirit of the winter holidays. Observing that moment when the world pauses to reconsider what life and human fellowship could be, this collection is better than a Christmas card and offers more longevity than many gifts given. Read Star: Poems for the Christmas Season every year to remember the deeper values beyond the commercialism that sometimes dominates Christmas.
Zoë Brigley, editor of Poetry Wales, author of Hand & Skull Bloodaxe Books https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/hand-skull-1213
A rich collection celebrating so many different aspects of Christmas: the material – gifts, decorations, shopping – is seen as an extension, a reflection of its spiritual heart, rather than, as more cynical commentaries often imply, in conflict with it, or even contradicting it.
Although each poem has a distinct character and mood, the collection seems informally linked by certain recurrent themes – like the door or narrow entrance which we must pass through to the realities of Christmas – ‘stooping under the lintel’ ‘waiting beyond the door’ ‘through a shabby stable door’: the importance of the pleasures and promises of Christmas lies in their recurrence – ‘are renewed every year’ ‘tell each other every year since then, a nightly choir’ ‘Ah could aye gie ma pipes a guid skirl neist year’…: the merging of the stars with the idea of revelation – particularly potent in the poems about the Magi and their wives. I especially liked the first-person narratives of the wives of Caspar and Melchior, contrasted with the third person for the wife of Balthazar who can no longer speak for herself…
The linking of church interiors and woodland or forest is very effective, especially when trees and stars are drawn so near to each other. The Christmas card is most moving, with its delicate subtlety, carefully avoiding too much pathos; the quote of ‘Come all ye faithful’ is a perfect example of the way you use familiar Christmas tropes in an original way, to deep and refresh perception.
The poems demand, and richly reward, close reading, especially In the shopping arcades, ‘What is it carries you/through this arcade?… ‘
Sian Best, librarian and writer. Author of A Whim Set In Concrete, Seren Books
