Kate Kellaway on Girlhood, by Julia Copus

Kate Kellaway reviews British poet Julia Copus's Girlhood (Faber) for The Guardian. "How do you think about time in which a lover was unmet, a baby unborn – time that was nonetheless filled with its own future?" asks Kellaway. "Poetry can play the games with time that life forbids." More:

Copus’s autobiographical poems are as richly detailed as novels, with roaring trains (and, sometimes, people) and an outdated phone “the colour of Milkybars” with her stepfather-to-be on the end of the line. (She has it in for phones: another phone, in a different poem, is “poised on its haunches. Black Bakelite fear.”) I was moved by The Week of Magical Thinking, about a dog’s last days, and how a fragment of willow pattern china stirs wild hope: “Without a future, I thought, there’d be no need of a bridge.”

The collection’s outstanding second half is an exploration of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s meetings with Marguerite Pantaine, who attempted to murder the actor Huguette Duflos. It is an anguished sequence...

The full review is here.