Strawberry Thief, Sara Berkeley’s first collection in more than a decade, opens with a suite of poems which celebrates her daughter’s birth – ‘Hail to her, and sunlight, and spirit songs’ – and looks backwards in ‘The Burning Building’ on the pain in, and recovery from, an unhappy marriage and the discovery of joy in a new relationship.
From the delicate detail of the unborn child who ‘brushed me with her lashes’ to its broad geographic sweep, the book bustles with life and colour and music. All the while, however, as it promotes the value of what she calls the ‘generous mercies’, her inventive, resolute voice learns ‘how today is made’.
Strawberry Thief is a book of startling recognitions and revelations: its rich, exotic, sensual poems carrying ‘the moment aloft / brimming, like water in a silver cup’.
