River Talk

River Talk is the Cumbrian water I know and love, a language that has run through me from an early age. River is refuge, friend who holds secrets and heals. Sometimes River is dangerous but always the music to be heard and respected in all its moods.

’Kerry Darbishire’s language flows with freedom and fluency, blurring boundaries of the self and the natural world to form landscapes on the page. Sophisticated yet accessible, her poems explore the peripheries of safety and danger, of the earthly and ethereal. Darbishire is an outstanding, original poet.’

’An exploration of the life of a river that invites us to come on a watery safari. Darbishire’s fluent and luminous poetic voice is immersive, making us feel we have experienced and understood what it means to inhabit that cool and limpid habitat. Unforgettable.’

’Kerry Darbishire has conjured a river god in this collection. The poems are full to the brim with stunning imagery and they move around the reader like a river around a stone. We are jostled and carried and sink beneath and swim with poems. These are poems of constant movement; they carry the reader from the start to the end on a wonderful journey, sometimes through rapids, sometimes slowly round slick bends and thick peaty darkness. The heart of this collection is in the intimate knowledge of landscape and the waterways running through it. This coupled with mesmeric writing makes this a collection of power and of purpose. One to revisit.’