A couple of months ago I reviewed Deborah L. Davitt's 'From Voyages Unreturning', a collection of poems released as part of Aqueduct Press's 'Conversation Pieces' series, and, in doing so, learned a new word: pantoum.

This is a poetic form that passes two of four lines from each stanza down to the next, which follows suit with the other two and so on, until the final stanza feeds two lines back to the first. I knew the form and appreciate how tricky it is to do well, given that it effectively tasks a poet with providing two different meanings or contexts for every line in a poem. I didn't, however, know its name, and I was thankful to learn it.

I also found it fascinating to see more examples of it in practice, which is why this collection, also a 'Conversations Pieces' book but by a different poet, was so welcome. In fact, unlike Davitt who was happy to play in a variety of different forms, including freeform, Walrath is so confident about her pantoums that she dedicated this entire volume to the form. That's a daunting proposition for any poet and I was eager to discover how well that worked out for her. Spoiler: it worked very well and there are reasons why she chose it, as explained in the afterwords.

I took notes while reading, as I tend to do, but I had to ditch many of them because there's a strong evolution to this volume. It evolves as it goes because it has a firm purpose that's not immediately clear but which focuses in closely at a couple of key points and prompts us to reevaluate the whole thing after it's done. I wasn't particularly fond of the first few poems and felt a little disappointed, both in the author and myself. What was I missing?

Well, what I was missing is that this is all about death and she's avoiding that as she starts out. It's something to pretend doesn't exist in a vain search for distraction, but, of course, death shows up anyway because it always does. The best lines early on are about it, such as "If you could download a soul, would it be mine?" The value in these early poems is in their impressionistic nature, with an abundant palette and a flighty nature.

They start to flow four or five poems in, less impressionistic and more focused. By 'Thunder Walks the Earth' half a dozen in, we realise how well she's building us. 'My Heart Beats Slower Now' is an absolute peach of a poem. 'Glowing Fish Swim Under My Skin' is even better, with a real punch to its final line, which is so simple that it only contains two words. They even become enticing, as if we're playing with death like a Halloween personification, but all blood and ritual rather than candy and plastic. It even gets erotically charged at points.

I get the impression that, once Walrath committed herself to this collection, which was written by invitation and originally published in Italy, and forced pen to paper, it just poured out of her. That may just be impression, of course, but it reads faster as it goes, at least until a point, even calling and responding. The charge in 'My Heart Beats Slower Now' is countered by the transience of 'The Rain Formed a Man and Reader, I Drank Him' and the sheer ache of 'A Black Fish Floating Belly Up in Regret'.

And regret comes back over and over, because the knowing confidence of 'I Created Your Final Girl' falls away and everything is consumed by grief. I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to at this point and I was reading these poems aloud to myself in isolation, like an unstoppable ritual. 'When I Ask, You'll Pull Me Out of the Water' is a gut punch. It's brutal, not just because it starts out feeling like suicide and ends up feeling like murder, but because it sees both as theft. It's powerful stuff: 'And a man keeps explaining to me how I'm natural / So natural I haunted his mouth with the shadow of my skin'.

And what feels like potential gradually turns into loss. Many of these poems have acceptance and a sense of fatalism, but there's guilt underneath all of them. 'Can't help but ask, how much of this was my fault?' Walrath asks and we know it's her voice, not only because her name is on the cover but because this is intensely personal material. Eventually, as we realise that everything is about losing someone, losing everyone, losing yourself, 'Parkinsons is a Kind of Armageddon' explains it. And she ends with the ultimate question: "How do you say I'm sorry to a ghost?"

These poems constitute quite the journey and, if you haven't worked out what the trigger was, the afterwards explain it. This volume will stay with me, as all good poetry should. It certainly made an overt connection for me, remembering how my own dad was in his final days, at home, in bed, with no chance of escaping the cancer that had already ravaged him by the time the doctors knew of it, of only relieving the pain for as long as he had. It was a sad time, of course, but an affirming one as well as he talked about himself and what mattered to him and why, and an increasingly weird one as the morphine took hold and he saw things that weren't there.

And, with all that said, I'll finish as I started by talking about pantoums. As I mentioned, it's a hard form for a poet to master but it gives opportunities that other forms don't, the circular rhythms a way to achieve moods and states that regular rhythms can't, let alone freeform poetry. What I had fun with was a growing feeling that I could see which direction Walrath had started from in most of these poems.

Many have impeccable first stanzas to serve as bedrock from which she could move the poem on to other places and it's interesting to see where they end up and how they come back around, as they must, to the beginning. However, others seem like they start loose because she actually started at the end, with the final stanza being the perfectly formed one from which everything else sprang as she worked her way backwards. I wonder how well I'd score if I gave her a list and she marked my work like a school test. It doesn't matter, of course, unless I give the form a shot myself.

I'm not sure how I got into reviewing the feminist fiction that Aqueduct Press publish, being an old straight white guy, but I'm always happy to open my eyes to what's written by people who aren't of my background in any way, shape or form. This is the third of three from them I've reviewed in July and it's easily the most powerful. I had problems with 'The Language of Water' and I relished half of 'Sacraments for the Unfit' far more than the other half, but this one's a gem. I'll be coming back to it, I think. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles in the Conversation Pieces series click here