When I was first asked to review a book of poems, How to Extricate Yourself, by Laura Theis, I declined: ‘I don’t usually do poetry reviews,’ I said. When I started to read them, I changed my mind at once. This little book, published by Dempsey & Windle in the UK, due for release on December 1, is a small treasure box filled with surprising, unusual jewels. As I read them, I was sometimes startled, often delighted or amused, by the images and feelings they radiate.

Let me give some examples. The first poem in the book that caught me is ‘Writer in Residence.’ The writer is on the moon, waving to her lover on earth, and apologises for leaving him. There is little reading material up there, just some dry manuals and a beautiful book on the cosmos. The timeline of our future, it says, foretells that the sun will expand, the moon spiral into the earth, and together,

and — this is the fun bit —

They will both fall fall fall

Into the sun: star-crossed lovers united at last.

Another one I love is ‘Sehnsucht,’ a German word meaning nostalgia. The background to this is that Theis grew up in Germany and moved to the UK a decade ago. In ‘Sehnsucht,’ she denies she is nostalgic for ‘you’ and list the things that enchant her ‘here.’ Can you imagine, she says, living in a place

where the skies do more crying than I do

where everything runs on repressed passions

and irony and wanton

excessive apologies?

The gentle mockery veils, perhaps, the nostalgia that is denied. Having lived in England for eight years, I find this thumbnail sketch of the English climate and character apt and endearing.

In ‘Colour of the Witch,’ a lover is a boy whose favourite colour is emerald, and willows are his favourite trees. Others warn her to stay away from him, and she finds he has strange powers:

his leaf-like fingers are curled around

the seeds of all sorrow all sadness all pain not just

yours or his – everyone’s …

This little book is Theis’s debut poetry collection. She has won many prizes and awards, and I foresee that she will go on to write more poems that enchant her readers. In this poetic world, shapes are rarely definite and can change instantly in unexpected and sometimes grotesque or fearsome ways; love is punctuated by space and distance, and entrances are accompanied by exits. The best poetry, for me, reminds us that reality is only a description of the world we have been trained to see, and that behind that surface, as the seventeenth-century poet, Andrew Marvell, said, there are ‘far other worlds, and other seas’ than those we are familiar with.

Copies can be bought direct from the publisher at this link: https://www.dempseyandwindle.com/lauratheis.html?fbclid=IwAR2cns7EiQHDzhTcV0NqpELW4sX7aRS2NrTnXe2qHXnQBii2q4oCE2Vns5I