Hide and Seek

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

Susan Glickman, the author of Henry Moore’s Sheep, continues her
exploration of the long poem as essay in this volume. It opens with a
14-page elegy for her friend and mentor Bronwen Wallace, who died of
cancer in 1989. “Running in Prospect Cemetery” carries the reader
through the life and death of Wallace—and through the disappointment
of infertility as experienced by the poet—in language that
reverberates with clarity and innocence. For Glickman, running is a
“gestural language of bone, the syntax / of sinew.” Running as
metaphor relates not only to the poet’s life journey but also to the
“runaway virus” of cancer, to the march “for reproductive
rights,” and to the “yellow-green” leaves that have “run their
course.”

In this collection of eight pieces, the title poem, “Hide and
Seek,” continues the theme of “the lost child”—the child who was
never really lost but “just not yet found,” who would “emerge from
the spider-webbed space under the stairs.” And emerge he does, only to
find himself the subject of food idioms and metaphors in “Hunger,” a
poem that evokes the voracious appetite of cancer cells and also the
passionate longing for something to fill the “white space.”

The volume concludes with a poem dedicated to “Jesse at two.” This
celebration of the yearned-for child contains a reference to mothers who
“in the park confer.” Through this small detail, the reader is taken
full circle—back to the late spring in Prospect Cemetery, and back to
the opening epigram by Rilke, which reminds us that “when a tree
blossoms, death as well as life blossoms in it.” Glickman affirms the
transitory beauty and sorrow of life.