Latch

Latch is a study in the act of returning. It is about reconnecting to a place, Suffolk, and understanding what it once held, and what it now holds for a woman and her family. These poems unearth the deep, lasting attachments people have with the East Anglian countryside, gathering voices of labour, love and loss proving a landscape can both harm and heal us. In this landscape, and in her fourth full-length collection, Rebecca Goss again draws on her distinctive ability to plough difficult, emotional terrain. Here is an anatomy of marriage, her parents' and her own, while the natural world becomes an arena for the emotional push and pull that exists between mothers and daughters. The return to a childhood home recalls young siblings retreating into nature as they steer the adult lives that disintegrate around them. This rich and unpredictable collection weaves memoir with magic realism, secrets with myth, light with dark. Readers will find themselves beckoned to barns, fields, weirs, to experience both refuge and disturbance: we are shown a county's stars, and why a poet needed to return to live under them.