Home, the latest collection from writer Emily Critchley, is part experimental confession, part elegiac plea. It is an exploration of the damage done by, in and to many different manifestations of ‘home’, with poetry about child abuse, wrongful imprisonment, #MeToo, borders, Brexit, ‘our lost biophilia’ and global warming, among other issues. It is also an attempt to work through the pieces of a broken family, a broken society and a broken planet, with whatever limited tools the poet can summon.
Whatever shards of hope may be picked out of the wreckage are in the understanding that we must be capable of doing more than we think – as individuals and collectively – to write a different future for ourselves and those with whom we share, indeed create, ‘home’. The collection dreams of a new ‘binding ground’ – something stabler beneath all our feet, and that a turning point, a ‘being otherwise’ may be under way.