Professor Heger's Daughter

The latest collection from Chrissie Gittins. The spur for the title poem was the torn and stitched letters from Charlotte Brontë to Professor Heger which are lodged between sheets of glass in the British Library. In their physicality they sit beside poems about a Georgian table decker who worked with ground glass and stained sugar, and the dots and dabs of Stanley Spencer’s painted blooms. But whether it’s the emerald trees of an Indian miniature, or the bonnets and long skirts of a Norwood Pissarro, these poems are conduits for love and loss. A journey is taken without the intended companion, jars of preserves invoke an exiled friend, the absence of wind calls up a landscape. And beyond that there is the cirrus cloud of absurdity.