Kissing the Night - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Reviewing Carol Rumens’ New Women Poets anthology, Anne Stevenson was struck by the ‘intriguing’ poems of Christine McNeill – an apt description of the work of an unusual poet. Born in Vienna in 1953 of Austrian parents, she grew up there, moving to Britain in 1970. She learned English at night school in London and trained as a tutor of ESL and German. She now lives in Cromer, and works in adult education as a German teacher in Norfolk. Her poems are written with an acute sense of the nuances, cadences and tone of her second tongue, pressured and sharpened by her experience of growing up in post-war Vienna. Many of her poems are shadowed by the guilt of her parents’ generation as she acts out their painful stories and uneasy reminiscences of daily life during the War. She also brings her heightened awareness of language as a political instrument into poems set in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The poems which follow her move to England have an emotional undertow drawn from Vienna, and often a brooding, almost hothouse atmosphere reminiscent of Roethke or Lowell at their most edgy, but also a wary mood which is quite particular to Christine McNeill. Tuned to cross borders and thresholds from one language and culture to another, Christine McNeill’s ways of seeing and her strongly female poetic sensibility are double-edged and doubly sensitive. Her poems have been widely published and her stories have been broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service. Kissing the Night is her first collection.

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