Book Review: The Meadow
- Apr 29, 2020
- 2 min read
The Meadow by Kristin Garth, APEP Publications, $14 paperback, 2020
Reviewed by Ambrose Hall
A collection of poetry that begins in childhood, with chilling glimpses into small town abuse, and follows the young girl into adulthood, to awkward early sexual encounters, through her first serious BDSM relationship, to its heartbroken ending. The Meadow is an intense, sometimes painful ride of mixed emotions that build and build into a fevered, dark sensuality, replete with thorns. As a reading experience, it’s both exhausting and hugely rewarding.
This collection is one woman’s story of reclaimed sexuality, of the difficult path taken between danger and desire when one’s desires are bound up with violence and degradation. The meadow of the title describes a safe place the young girl flees to in her mind to escape abuse, which becomes a sought after submissive head-space in adulthood, a prize after consensual pain. The ghost of the child in the earlier poems lingers on in the later ones. Garth never lets the reader become complacent, never allows us to look away from every aspect of her reality, from the worst to the best, and it’s this uncompromising dedication to telling her story as both a survivor and an empowered sexual being, that she does so well in not only this collection, but others too.
The bulk of the poems capture the heady rush of first sexual experimentation, the games of dare late-teens play with themselves when they’re hungry for new experiences and the ups and downs of finding fulfilment when your desires are marginalised and often misunderstood. As reward, there’s the thrill of finding kindred spirits and of dangerous games played well.
Like much of Garth’s work, most of the poems are Shakespearean sonnets, packed tight with emotion and clever wordplay, that give up new treasures with each reading, interlaced in places with a sharp political bite. Garth plays with the sonnet form to disrupt expectations, to keep readers on their toes and to deliver the occasional hard slap or whip crack.
