Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781781723104
Publication date: February 26, 2016
Price: £9.99
‘A Boat Called Annalise is a triumphant collection of poetry, marking a new embarkation for Hjelmgaard as a poet. It’s a collection which can be read time and time again, and will especially be appreciated by readers looking for new beginnings, those experiencing life’s traumas and working through the healing process called grief.’ – Wales Arts Review
‘This collection invites you to meet Lynne Hjelmgaard and share part of her journey. It’s a worthwhile trip.’ – Orbis
A Boat Called Annalise, Lynne Hjelmgaard’s new poetry collection, is wonderfully evocative of life on a sailboat: “Still, Annalise has that smell: slightly honeyed, rusty cans, soapy rags, brewed coffee, a whole cinnamon in a drawer”. The book recalls a journey this much-travelled author took on a sailboat to the Caribbean and back to Europe with her husband. In the first section, we are with the author as she gets her ‘sea legs’. The couple’s relationship is poised on tensions, beautifully observed, as masculine/ feminine, the need to assert and/or withdraw in the face of the turbulent seascape.
Life at sea contrasts with the tropical beauties of their dream-like destination. We breathe a sigh of relief, as the author does, when we catch sight of our destination on the horizon, ‘Through Binoculars I see a Turquoise Harbour’. We are then given life on the island and a number of insights into both the gorgeous vegetation and exotic insect “A stick that grew wings and flew away” and animal life and into the locals, as in ‘Island Gossip’. We also sense the author’s growing awareness of a tainted paradise: the lavish lives of Honeymooners and tourists side-by-side with the poverty of the native west-Indians.
Inevitably, there is a retreat. The author sails back to other ‘mainlands’ in Europe and the USA and we learn that as life goes on in various cities, the husband also dies of an illness, leading the author-protagonist back to her recollections of their voyage to the islands and to some of the halcyon days of their marriage. The author reflects back on her life and we recall the epigraph to the book, a quote from The Odyssey: ‘You must take up your well-shaped oar and go on a journey until you come where there are men living who know nothing of the sea.’
In the final section of the book, the tone becomes movingly elegiac. There is indeed a return to the islands and further reflections on life there. “The tamarind have all but disappeared. /Trade winds occupy our house on the hill.” Other bereavements incite reflections on mortality and happiness. Hjelmgaard’s poems are beautifully poised, full of clear-eyed and frequently humorous observations. Her work is full of sentiment without being sentimental. Readers will enjoy their trip on A Boat Called Annalise.
Lynne Hjelmgaard
Lynne Hjelmgaard was born in New York City and lives in London. She taught Creative Art for children in various schools and institutions before she started writing poetry. She left the States in 1990 for the second time and has been living permanently in the UK since 2011. As a result of crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat with her husband she wrote the poems that were collected in Manhattan Sonnets (Redbeck Press, 2003) and was later released in CD format. After her husband died in 2006, she received a residency grant for the Danish Academy in Rome where she wrote poems that later appeared in her second collection The Ring (Shearsman Books, 2011). Her third poetry collection, A Boat Called Annalise, was published by Seren in 2016 and accounts for the journey Lynne took with her husband by boat across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Europe. Her new collection A Second Whisper is available now.
