And Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered,
undrowned by new voices.
The pinnacles come in the downbeat moments however: The Peaks and
Undrowned (their songwriting's finest hour?).
In the previous book, The
Undrowned Child, Teodora (the child of the title), was destined to save Venice from the ghost of Bajamonte Tiepolo, the traitor.
The "1" consonant also manages the lesion between the sonnet's octet and sestet, where the
undrowned image rises to the surface of the "low wave." With "fell" and "fall" the gap between the sonnet's two parts is both asserted and crossed: "and my tears fell.
The
Undrowned Child by Michelle Lovric (Orion, pounds 9.99)
Station three of the poem shifts to a vision of his father's ghost emerging "
undrowned" from the river, an imagined resurrection authenticated by the "claritas" attained through this ritual of remembrance.
But the repeated cry for help is addressed to all others who would become other than other in a kinship of attention to the cry and to the poem, which is thus able to begin its life as the work of the poet, who is remembered (an "
undrowned" name), and as something more than simply the work of the poet.
The Tynedale lads sing songs that sound utterly contemporary, and it's in that overarching modernity, in their singer's love of the falsetto and in lyricism full of absorbingly rich imagery and wordplay where they bring to mind Kendal's Wild Beasts (think of
Undrowned, full of alienation, greed and footballer's wives, with their "system of pistons arachnid and blistered").