Margaret Lloyd, Sleeping in the Same World, Kelsay Books, 2024

This is a substantial book, not only in its 100 pages but in its seriousness of subject and purpose.  It is divided into two sections, the first consists of a series of some fifty untitled poems under the title of the book – a series that might be seen as a single poem. The second is a more conventional grouping under the title ‘Journeys’.

The crucial journey is evoked in the book’s very last poem and quoted as the book’s epigraph:

My father, mother, Gareth, and I took a train
from Liverpool to Southampton docks and boarded
the  Britannic, tourist class, nine days later
arriving in the Port of New York
with three trunks, one basket, one tin trunk,
six suitcases and one hat box.

These lines, prose-like in their depiction of her family’s emigration to the United States, contain one of the book’s main themes that of home:

        And nostos lingers
            A trying to get back to

Something else
            a home which forever
         eludes  

        And which we know
              we might not even recognize
          if we arrive

The broken-up lines, resorting to the Greek word and the immigrant’s concept of nostos, register the uncertainty that has followed the matter-of-fact details of the Lloyd family’s journey to the United States. The deployment of free verse, and of the prose-like tenor of ‘Measurements’, is characteristic of Lloyd’s technical skill and ...