Sarah Westcott’s keen-eyed second collection, Bloom, deals in surfaces that shift and cut, resist, ‘knives turned in the light’, ‘the lake’s blue skin’ ‘the crust of birds’, and those that create and dissolve boundaries. There are ‘insects that batter at the glass’, and the softness of light, ‘milky, sieved’. There is a total dissolution of otherness: ‘Tonight I am the buttercups…when I smell them / I can only smell myself’ (‘Spring Fragments’). In spite of surfaces or because of them, subject and object become the other, or more fully themselves: two truths that might coexist in the ongoing tension of duality and its resolution.

It is a particular gift of Westcott’s poems to connect directly with an animal nature that can slip past intellectual overlay, or the mediation of thought, can experience ‘Weepings and softenings without interpretation or layer’, can feel: ‘the feeling is what I mean’ (‘Apples’). Moving directly through sense, so often of touch and smell, the poems also become archetypal, surfacing with the ancient layers of myth. There is light and the dark, regenerative, unknown, whose shadows also shape and deepen imagination. And always a sure-footed musicality: ‘Greenly we come the truth to green / looped breath, perpetual singing’ (‘Inconsolable Green’).

This weaving together of natural elements, nakedness and that which cannot be understood by the naked eye, creates an invitation to experience by a kind of osmosis the deep pull of the rhythms that govern life, pre-rational, but precise as science: the world of the microscope, lichen and leaf, and the pulse and movement of the life force itself: its greenness, its softness, its violence, its disruptions. In an echo of the title, ‘bloom (menarche)’ explores the interruption of childhood, where images of ‘first spring flowers’, and ‘holy water’ are detonated by the menace of ‘slit and stalked’, ‘red-tipped’ and ‘terrible’. In ‘Deflower’, by contrast, the title word itself is repurposed to animate a world brimming with the purity of ‘sweet white flowers, / Apple blossom falling’, the narrator herself ‘a pressed flower’. Elsewhere these lyrical transformations inevitably fade to the ‘leaf fado’, ‘the memory field’. In the life of a ‘leaf, feathery with flower’, there is time ‘deepening and loosening’, sound and rhythm amplified to enact this release. And always the utility of nature, continuous, regenerative, ‘stewed into richness, itself the richness’ (‘Spring Fragments’).

These are poems that capture a sense of the things that are ‘bewildering’, ‘tender’, ‘deliriously unwell’: flowers and flesh, freshness and grass, sweetness and shock, the ‘violence of dawn’. Birds and clouds, fruit and sky jostle together in a volume that is full of smells and swiftness, rooflines and gardens, mythological landscapes of childhood and the forest. Westcott reveals the multiplicity of our experience, its many truths, the very skin, permeable, robust, by which we know the world, its elements and our many selves, the ‘world’, the poet says, ‘moving through my body’ (‘Familial’).

Preoccupied with bodies, the predicament and miracle of embodiment, of sense and skin, whether human or animal, plant or elemental, these are poems that chart expanse and contraction. Westcott engages with the mysteries of language ‘worn as a skin’, shed ‘at night’, and the closeness, at times, of ‘the place we come from before birth’ (‘Apples’). And, in ‘Mid-Life’, there is what we ‘will never know’, the ‘parts of our bodies…The soul, inanimate’, combined with the powerful sense of being an animal, with ‘a body to rove in’, moved ‘in the animal way’ - such different motivations from the intellectual. This is a mesmerising volume that invites us again and again to rove, to leave a different track behind.