This Particular Earthly Scene
Margaret Lloyd
"It is a pleasure to see poetry that is neither young nor old. Poetry of the adult heart. Beyond beginnings, past childhood, past first love, past the first child.
And without nostalgia. This is fine poetry about a married heart that is still ambitious."
—Jack Gilbert
"The materials of This Particular Earthly Scene are one woman's life—her experience of marriage and children, of the tension between responsibility towards
others and personal creative needs, of love and 'the failure of love.' These are poems of the 'unquiet heart,' which knows 'the complexity of inconstancy,' and
of a mind which faces harsh reality, including difficult self-knowledge, without illusions. The poems achieve rather than assume knowledge; their aim is not
to display but to understand...The poems are well-shaped and unobtrusively skilful. Here, simplicity and directness are used subtly, to convey complex
emotional states, and to achieve vivid expression. There is nothing loud or showy about the poems, but their quiet surface opens on unquiet depths."
—Jeremy Hooker
"Elegantly crafted, deeply experienced, Margaret Lloyd's This Particular Earthly Scene is a book of woman's wisdom, sexual and spiritual, filled with
seductions, scars, human touch."
—Alicia Ostriker
poetry from this particular earthly scene
