When people we love die, somewhere in the grief there may be a sense of wonder: we can't believe it, where have they gone, what are they now, what does that make us? We are led to question the designs and very limits of life itself. Greta Stoddart's third collection Alive Alive O follows the human impulse to make sense of mortality. Death is reconfigured not so much to console us but as a way of playing out different scenarios, trying for variants in meaning and metaphor, that we may better know it. But for all their focus and attention on loss these are not poems of despair. In their intensity and spirit our mortal life becomes a thing to behold, even in - or because of - the face of death.
