Typewriter

The private matters of Hetherington's Typewriter are thinly veiled behind an ever so gently crafted prose, causing the reader to walk in the poet's shoes, and tripping over lines like 'a diary from a shelf. It says she doesn't love him', evoking unwelcome memories. These are poems that know how intimately language and feeling are bound - how a love letter vanishes with the same regularity as beating wings, how promises dissolve like crystals in water, how decades of a shared life can collapse into seven words. Hetherington writes in two interlocking sequences, Typewriter and Manuscript, and between them they enact precisely what they describe: the attempt to recover, through writing, what writing itself cannot quite hold.

The prose poem is the ideal form for this undertaking. Its sentences move with the unhurried confidence of someone who has thought carefully about what they are about to say - and then said something slightly different. Meaning arrives slant, in the gap between what is spoken and what is understood, between the key that drops into an overgrown yard and the lock it no longer fits. Memory here is not a reliable archive but a palimpsest, layered and partially whited-out, and the reader is invited to read between those erasures. The effect is quietly cumulative: by the time Hetherington drafts an obituary for the living, or traces a grandmother's drowning beneath a canal's mustard-yellow surface, or watches a figure swim towards him like an ungainly mermaid, the emotional weight has been building so steadily that its arrival feels both surprising and inevitable.

What makes this collection distinctive is its tonal restraint. There is no performance of anguish here, no raised voice. The grief is real but it is worn lightly, carried the way one carries 'a crumpled letter in an overcoat pocket' - present at all times, occasionally smoothed out and re-read, never quite digestible. Hetherington's language reaches always towards precision - flavours as purple as lustrous aubergine, adverbial pleasure, prepositional intimations - and it is in that reaching, that never-quite-arriving, that the poems find their truth.