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Review of Playing House by Katherine Stansfield

Ms Stansfield's poems are an absolute delight to read. Each one a glimpsed moment, captured, caught out from the kaleidoscope of colours and movement that pass the rest of us by in our ever busier lives; the lines shot through with grace and elegance, bringing beauty into words and phrases that cannot ever be forgotten. Moments welling up from the deepest of consciousness, held, cherished. Ennobled. The second-last line of my favourite poem 'Ghazal from John' sums up the aching grandeur of her breathless inner world. 'Poems bloom in allotments and travel the memory of leeches.'