Review – Crown of Thorns by Bethany W Pope
(Oneiros Books 2013, price £5)
Bethany Pope’s latest collection Crown of Thorns describes itself on the title page as a ‘Marriage of Forms’. Indeed it is the formal structure the poet employs in this book, with such elegance and apparent ease, which must be first and foremost admired. A marriage is a union and Pope’s collection, a complex weaving of narrative is conceived as a single poem which tells the story of family – Pope’s own family and her place in it. And quite a story it is too. The story is told unflinchingly through a series of sonnet crowns that are variously and ingeniously linked, by theme, by storyline, even by bloodline. The final section of the book ‘Bloodlines’, consisting of 45 sonnets subdivided into three sections is a further variation on the sonnet crown form described by Pope as an Emperors Crown. The result is an epic, almost biblical depiction of ancestral ties and the family tree to which the poet belongs. In the first of these 45 sonnets Pope writes The/History of family sets the future in its tread. This is the adage on which the entire book rests.