If you have visited the coves and inlets of south-western Turkey you will relish these poems. They constantly transport the reader to the wilder beauty of a Mediterranean landscape rarely to be found further west. Here are the pine-clad slopes of the Ceramic Gulf, the sheltering bays, the olive groves edging the salty shore, the hidden clefts and mysterious springs and pools. It is a place that resonates an ancient pagan past. Alan Mountford's reflective poems, with their sharp images of colour, movement and changing weather, remind us that it is still largely an untamed landscape. Only the poet's eye, he says, tries to subdue it: 'One cannot help but see the landscape emblematically - gendered, familial, rich in secrets, myth, alien, but not unfriendly...' Emperors and barbarians swept through classical Caria. Yet there were settled communities that have left behind tantalising and evocative remains. Today's golden hordes, or those on their 'blue' cruises, search out an 'unspoilt' vision of this ancient world to renew their inner fire and sense of self. But the poet shrewdly observes that nothing remains static in the narrative of landscape, or in our own lives. Change is a constant factor. The landscape itself is victim of weather and human endeavour. What we are left with is 'a sense of place hard won from earth and air and light'. The successful poetic record of this 'sense of being and belonging' is ours for the finding in this finely wrought collection.
