A Career in Accompaniment is a pamphlet of love, loss and surprising lightness. Based on Alex Reed’s personal experiences, these poems witness what it is like to care for a lover with severe illness and to live with a future where there is no “escape without damage”. Spare and accessible language of the everyday reinforces the emotional power and resonance of “all the falling” but also recalls moments of great tenderness, when “the world lit in her eye”. This poetry of “fragile places” is very intimate yet very universal.
“Reading these poems, you are struck by their striving for truthfulness – as if that might be the key to making sense of a seemingly senseless situation, a life no one could prepare for. And yes, truthfulness seems to work – opening into absolute presence, careful observation of detail and moment-by-moment tenderness and courage. Here you are listening to a generous, unassuming voice, drawing our human vulnerability and capacity for endurance closely together, with space to breathe and gather what threatens to scatter. Restraint and discretion characterise the poems as well as openness – a hard-won but lightly-worn congruence. ‘A Career in Accompaniment’ reminds us what poetry makes possible.” Linda France
R.R.P. £5.50
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A sample poem from the pamphlet can be found below:
Inch the door a fraction further, look
for the tell-tale rise of her sheet,
my vigil of four days now. The doctor
said Just keep going. I try
to hold her presence like a breath
in this room; tread softly as I can,
like a walker in the woods who sees
a deer in a clearing. Until a twig
snaps underfoot. She is far away
and I am here – I picture her
waking, startled a second, then her eyes
drink me in; her thin arms, bare breasts,
her hand behind my head, I dream
of a lover, dream of the lovers we were.
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