Reviewed by Amber Spalding
Rebecca Goss (Carcanet Press: 2023)
Latch by Rebecca Goss is a poignant and finely crafted poetry collection that deeply explores the complexities of returning home. At its core, the collection is about her own journey of rediscovering the Suffolk landscape – what it once held, and how to rekindle a connection with it.
The title, Latch, is layered with meaning. It evokes the physical act of a baby latching onto its mother, symbolising the primal bond between a parent and child. But it also speaks to the idea of attachment in a broader sense – the connections we form with people, places and memories, and the ways in which these bonds endure, even in the face of loss. This theme of attachment – how it sustains, how it breaks, and how it endures – is entwined throughout her writing. Her poems are rich with imagery that is at once tender and haunting; a sense of absence and presence, of life and death co-existing.
While navigating these new and yet familiar landscapes, Goss reflects on the ways in which the natural world can offer solace and a sense of connection. In ‘The Farm,’ the Suffolk landscape becomes a character in its own right, ‘the frequent tipping of us / out of the kitchen into barn, meadow, stream with its / fluctuating depths. Her trust in the countryside unwavering’ (p. 20). This motion from the controlled, human-made space to the wild, natural world becomes a backdrop for her own exploration of memory, loss, and healing.
We are delighted to be able, with permission, to reproduce in this issue of BookTalk ‘Woman Returns to Childhood Home, Carries Out an Act of Theft’, one of the poems from Latch. Rebecca also writes here about the inspiration for her collection.
Rebecca Goss will be talking to Suffolk Book League at an event on Thursday 10th October 2024.
You can buy tickets here: https://www.suffolkbookleague.org/events-1/rebecca-goss
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