Man at the Ice House

A welcome full first collection from Alison Mace. Poems about family relationships, and by implication love and loss, are delicately and minutely observed and felt. She writes fearlessly on ageing and death, but these are not mournful poems - rather they are truthful and moving. Mace is skilled in sustained verse form and also subtle in her use of it, as, for example, rhymes and half-rhymes which make their impact within lines as surely as they do when they appear as line endings. Included is a long novelistic sequence set in New England - an absorbing tour de force commemorating the long life of her American aunt. Joy Howard, Editor, Grey Hen Press