Goose Fair Night is a juicy and vibrant collection of poems in which Kathy Pimlott’s insightful observations on family, age, work and life in the Midlands are brought to us wrapped in flavours, feelings and scents. The pamphlet drips with the sugars of jams and jellies, like those in ‘Preserving’, but behind the surface of “astringent jellies” lie darker things that leave Pimlott “sticky with grief” (‘All the Way Here’).
 

The success of the poems served up here relies on Pimlott’s ability to extract beauty from mundane images. Like in ‘Our National Bird’, we wade “knee-high, / splashing” through the collection, looking with new excitement upon everyday things.
 

Place is key in Goose Fair Night. Pimlott wants us to feel how places are ingrained in us, how they are part of us, as they are in the opening poem, ‘You Bring Out the Nottingham in Me’. ‘Goose Fair’ takes us to the “electric dark / beyond the caravans” while in ‘All the Way Here’, we traverse with from Bobbers Mill, to the Ring Road, to Seven Dials. The seaside is enduringly present, too – the coast means chip shops and piers. In ‘These Occasional Absences’ , Pimlott tries “fitting / [her] bones into the rocks” , in some way becoming the places she visits. These wide beaches and seascapes are nicely juxtaposed with her parallel interest in small spaces, like the larder and like in ‘Things to Do in Small Spaces’. The ordinary is elevated to the beautiful, here celery is “like a bouquet in a jug” in Pimlott’s magical larder.


 

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