Black Country

Extraordinary collection! Berry writes about what it means to be home, to grow up and leave, and then return and learn to love it once again. I love how she plays with nuances of her local dialect of the West Midlands. It brings the place life within these pages. I'd love to see Berry perform these poems live. Some of my favourite moments:

For years you kept your accentin a box beneath the bed,the lock rusted shut by hours of elocution

My interest in you became geological.Pulling on your wellingtons to walk the dog in the rain,you were granite, durable, funereal almost.Under bath water, you were the agateI found on Brighton beach as a child, sleekand mottled as seal's skin.At other times you seemed a rarer gem

That last summer before school robbed languagefrom my mouth and parcelled it up in endlessLadybird Books, you made me a boat of wordsand pushed us off from the jetty into the Sea of Talk

[I have] conducted science's great experimentsusing darkened cupboards, plastic cups and cressand unhooked a high window on a stuffy dayand heard the room's breath,I have measured time by paper snowflakes,blown eggs, bereft cocoonsand waved goodbye in summer so many timesthat even in September my heart is June.