Hearing Eye

The Son of a Shoemaker is a sequence of eighteen prose poems based on the early life of Hans Christian Andersen. The poems are collaged from a fictionalised biography of Andersen, The Shoemaker’s Son, by Constance Buel Burnett, which was published by George G Harrap & Co in 1943. The text is illustrated by the author.

“this is an interesting and rewarding set of poems from a poet whose work was new to me. I’ll be looking to read more of that work and suggest you do, too.”

These poems sit squarely in the realm of experimental not just because they are prose poems…the poems are best gauged in a cumulative fashion, as one would do with a piece of music where the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. The rewards of approaching the collection in this way become more apparent on re-reading….It begins to dawn on the reader just how clever the poet has been….When this realisation is added to the rich visual imagery contained in lines like ‘A piece of glass no bigger than a tile inserted itself in a morsel of sky’ makes for very satisfactory, revealing reading especially when you dip into the poems again and again.

Read thoughtfully, Linda Black’s intriguing book can indeed alert us to the depths of meaning that may go unnoticed behind small differences.