A London Review Bookshop Book of the Year

Rebecca Goss’ fourth and most ambitious collection, Latch, is a study in the act of returning. It is about reconnecting to a place, Suffolk, and understanding what it once held, and what it now holds for a woman and her family. These poems unearth the deep, lasting attachments people have with the East Anglian countryside, gathering voices of labour, love, and loss with compelling particularity. The book is various, unpredictable: memory and magic interweave, secrets tangle with myth. As in her earlier books, Goss again draws on her distinctive ability to plough difficult, emotional terrain. Here is an anatomy of marriage, her parents’ and her own, while the natural world becomes an arena for the emotional push and pull that exists between mothers and daughters. The return to a childhood home recalls young siblings retreating into nature as they steer the adult lives that disintegrate around them. Readers will find themselves beckoned to barns, fields, weirs, to experience both refuge and disturbance: we are shown a county’s stars, and why a poet needed to return to live under them.