Paper. No pen. To mark
the words beginning, might I
move a leaf, a twig, a stone?
Or let thought's memorial be
traces in the cells, lighter
than snow, more lasting perhaps
than messages in pollen?
                     Distant
the minds that made us. Sacred,
our present, to their memory, the press
of desire in us for futures.

from 'Solstice', Timeslips

The epigraph of Anne Cluysenaar's Double Helix (Carcanet, 1982) was from Anna Akhmatova: 'To keep alive the wonder of suffering/You have been metamorphosed into me.'

This theme was explored in the ways a child develops and becomes. Cluysenaar is alive to natural and cultural conditioning, but also attached to 'the holiness of the heart's affections'. As the title Timeslips suggests, she focuses on slippages of time, in landscape, and between different ways of life and language. The imagination is continuously and unstoppably transformed, yet rides the flow of its metaphors into the experiences latent in everyday life. In earlier poems the slippages are intimate, between the generations and cultures of her own family. 'Timeslips' moves to a wider sphere of geological, evolutionary and historical change, concluding with the twenty-two poems of 'Vaughan Variations'. Here the life and Usk landscape of the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan provide themes for meditations on bilingualism, war, nature and the spiritual resources of poetic form.