Girling

In Girling, her open-hearted debut collection, Eve Esfandiari-Denney wrestles with the boundaries between living and death, history and the present, and how these are preordained for us in the fabric of our DNA and in our geographical or cultural environments. Through a personal relationship with illness and a closeness to death, the author asks the reader, I hope its ok to die. I can / be something / like actualized metaphor. She recounts the story of a father left abandoned in a church, and remembers a grandmothers home in a travellers caravan. Grief is portrayed with a tongue in cheek, cosmic register, as the speaker invests in lions mane, attempts to feel super-radiant, and moves into moon pose, while we watch electronic deep-sea claws on YouTube, and google what to do if your mum died last night. Philosophical, funny, pertinent, ecological, global and intimate, this is a collection of poems for the contemporary moment, a book deeply personal yet communal in its intention, beginning from a personal history then resonating outwards, ending on a note so gorgeously hopeful, as life moves towards the speaker, gloriously close.