In these 40 powerful new poems, Sarah Broom explores the effect of a life-threatening condition by way of the landscapes of the natural world, charting the hardest things in beautiful language. Broom's forte is in encapsulating, expressing, and making sense of strong internal feeling and turmoil through metaphor, and in Gleam, her poems bring together heightened emotion, a robust sense of the physical body, and an external landscape in controlled, sinewy language. In the title poem, she charts a radiotherapy session in both physical and metaphoric terms: “there are avenues of light / and now there is a wide and open terrain, my brain / is a vast, hilly country.” This impressive collection examines basic human truths with clarity and force and will open out painful, rewarding vistas for its readers.
