Former university lecturer in medieval literature and teacher of English and Drama, Gail Ashton is well-known for her academic works with Bloomsbury, Macmillan and Routledge. She is also published by Cinnamon Press and has brought out three previous collections of poetry, most recently, ‘What rain taught us’. In 2015 she edited a collection of writing about place called ‘Meet Me There’ and in 2019 she wrote an experimental memoir called ‘Not the Sky’. ‘If this was a map of your life’ is her fourth collection of poetry and it is a Joint Winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize, 2023. She lives in rural Herefordshire.

The collection contains 41 poems with the title poem coming at the close. Unity of theme is one of Ashton’s strengths. In this case, it is the seeking of solace and contentment as seen through the lens of the natural world. Poems about friendship and loss find expression in focussed attention to detail.

Within the poems themselves there are some notable turns of phrase. ‘What if we were to ask for fire’, for example, ends with the couplet

You will never know your voice
is full of sherbet lemons.

‘Once all this was fields’ opens with the lines ‘October’s here early my love, all snap and witch- / bone light’. Descriptions of a garden are often neatly phrased with some well-chosen vocabulary. ‘What would it look like, this letter to myself?’ begins as follows:

Tethered to home I wander
from room to room
shocked by purple and gold
spiking the garden, a last flush
of roses alight in a tawny acer.

In ‘You would love that’ The names of specific plants such as agrimony, coltsfoot, smellfox, fairy flax and alkanet, add beauty and variety to the poem. Ashton uses her extensive botanical knowledge to good effect in her poetry. She is also good at employing memorable imagery drawn from the natural world. In ‘Well, we’ll just have to see’, a doctor’s bleeper is described as being like ‘a bird fluttering / away down a treeless corridor’.

Ashton’s passion lies in nature. There is a sequence of poems about oak trees and a garden is often in her sights. Several poems are addressed to family and friends. Some poems have been inspired by quotations from other writers such as the French writer Annie Emaux and the American poet Mary Oliver.

Visually, there is some experimentation with the way the text is presented on the page. Stylistically, the unexpected use of rhyme at the end of some of the poems brings with it a sense of satisfaction and completion. These quiet poems reward us with their diligence and detail.

Gail Ashton, If this was a map of your life, Indigo Dreams Publishing, £9.50.

Neil Leadbeater is also one of our Ink Pantry reviewers, and published poets. You can find more of Neil’s work here on Ink Pantry.