The Woman Downstairs

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.

Who is the woman downstairs? She exhibits almost psychic powers of
observation; has an attentive eye for detail; travels highways of
reality and dreams. Ultimately, she has felt loneliness in every cell of
her body and can relate to this emotion in everyone she meets. She is
“a woman alone” who would accept a “living” offer of a weekend
houseguest over the imagined dead poet who has “long since lost
interest in sex.”

Bruck’s first volume of poetry comprises three sections: “Against
Glass” offers poems in which the protagonist is looking out/in a
window, observing; “Methods for Falling” is about a variety of ways
to “fall” into limbo (one way describes the space between being
there and being elsewhere as “a continuum of tail lights at dusk”);
“Second Sun” suggests ways to fill the limbo of loneliness, such as
by living dangerously.

Throughout this interesting collection, Bruck treats readers to
glimpses of profound, private moments through the all-seeing eyes of
“the woman downstairs.”