Starting with a chance meeting and a collaborative experiment in open field poetry, A Screen of Brightness gradually emerged a set of poems ‘sung into being across the green spaces of wales and England – the miles of fields, waterways, roads, motorways, towns, industrial build-ups and farmsteads that separate Anglesey and Birmingham’. Poetry that was initially a way to keep writing ‘when circumstances threatened to silence us’ celebrates extraordinary moments in the midst of the quotidian, ‘Let us say it is gratuitous / that this much colour is given / to the mundane, to the moment,’ (Fiona Owen, Fuschia). Each poem becomes a seed for the next, but also the fruit of the last. At the heart of this collection is the impulse ‘to be fully where I am’; an impulse that sometimes meets painful resistance in the face of trash that litters not only canal banks, but also the interior landscape. This is brave, eloquent poetry in which the human encounter is laid bare and in which we are immersed in questions of how and where we make ‘home’; how we establish and carry a sense of oikos in a world of change in which seasons, light and life continually shift.

“This collaboration between two poets which took place over four seasons, beginning in the summer of 2009, is quick with the detail of passing moments and rich with lived experience. It is a poetry of relationship, between Fiona Owen in Anglesey and Meredith Andrea in Kings Norton, Birmingham. The relationship is between the two women as they respond to each other out of the daily sensations, perceptions and struggles of their lives, and between them and their home ground.

In ‘Early July’ Fiona Owen writes: ‘the garden/and me in it/waiting/for something/to break’. These seemingly simple words encapsulate the spirit of the collaboration. In ‘Running Stitch’ Meredith Andrea speaks of ‘my mouth so full of world/its tongue is tasting not commanding words’ Each poet places herself in the world, not dominating it, or putting herself first, but waiting to receive what is revealed, what is given. Her receptivity is both towards her fellow poet and towards nature, experienced as ‘the locus of being’. One consequence of this is that both poets are open to the power of nature. Meredith Andrea experiences humanly degraded aspects of the urban world, but while these differ from Fiona Owen’s rural Anglesey, both poets share an instinct like that ascribed to the dog in Fiona Owen’s ‘Another Field Walk’: they are ‘on the trail of the elusive wild world/of things that flit and hint at otherness’. As in the great romantic poetry of another age, but with a sense of the modern ecological crisis, the poets have a sense of the ‘fit’ between nature and the human mind.

This is wonderfully responsive poetry. Fiona Owen grieves for her mother’s death, and Meredith Andrea responds sensitively to her friend’s loss. Their mutual openness results for both in a sense of visitation, of words that come ‘flapping their wings’, as in Fiona Owen’s ‘From scattered leaves’. But their wise passiveness is in no way a dull naturalism. Both deploy arts of notation that catch the momentary quick of experience. But both also deploy language inventively, thinking with words, images and metaphors . In ‘Cae Carreg Corn’ Fiona Owen asks: ‘What is it, wind-through-the-tall-grass?’ and says: ‘you seem to be whispering in something/like a voice, which meets my own inwardness’. Meeting between inward and outward, between human spirit and nature, and between the two poets, with their different circumstances and complementary gifts, make this a truly remarkable poetic collaboration. “
Jeremy Hooker