Volvelle

Volvelle, Rachael Boast’s fifth collection, bridges contemporary preoccupations with identity – particularly disability – with traditional poetic modes such as the pastoral, homage or ekphrasis.

Boast highlights the need to remember old forms of connection in an era of fragmentation and technological acceleration. Her title embodies something of this in its elegant, recurring consonants – conjuring love, revolve, evolve, the volvelle a paper chart of rotating parts for calculating the cycles of the sun and the moon.

There are poems here in the realm of Tennyson and Keats; a re-imagination of Coleridge as an eco-prophet; poems rich in the atmospheres of French arthouse cinema, and others in conversation with Anna Akhmatova, Mirabai and Sufi poetry. Rachael Boast’s quietly passionate collection delves also into ‘the body politic’ with a fusing of poetry and reportage on global conflicts and ecocide.

With a keen sense of roots, connection and outreach, Volvelle circles the question of what it means to stay human in our age of anxiety and hyper-materialism.