Poetry Review – MEETING PLACES: Antony Johae reviews a recent collection by Sally Festing
Meeting Places
Sally Festing
Mica Press
ISBN 978-1-869848-41-5
70pp £10
A collection of poems with a colourfully attractive front cover always makes for a welcome start before opening the pages. This is the case with Sally Festing’s Meeting Places, depicting the outline of a bather in grey-green stepping into two lines of curvy white waves on a sea-blue background. The place, as we learn from inside the cover, is the North Norfolk coast where the poet lives and finds much of the inspiration for her poetry. This becomes immediately apparent in the poem entitled, “Echoes”:
I remember early morning, dawn coming up
under dusky skies, beachcombing,
foraging for wood
when marram stripped
my legs and stung. . . .
In “Cartographica”, the history and landscape of the region, memorialised in Josh Danziger’s Norfolk wall maps, are blended with the poet’s intimate experience of place:
Cross-stitch, back-stitch, chainstitch, hem-
lines stitch together where flatness
eventually corrugates to sand hills
through a patchwork of waterways and marsh
before hours of dark open fistfuls of stars.
From two small Burnhams
with lines full of spirit, layer upon layer
are deeply embedded in my body
and mind . . .
One can see here how integral place is to the speaker’s being and, by extension to her mission as a poet. However, this is not solely one held in isolation from others, but rather shared with those emotionally close to her, notably her family. This draws attention to two subtle meanings in the collection’s title, Meeting Places: places with which the poet has come into familiar contact, but also those people intimate to the poet who are met with in life in particular places, the North Norfolk coast and sometimes far beyond. Family, therefore, figures importantly, but not always as close encounters as in “Julian”, named after her adult grandson. ‘You fly to hot haunts with heated swimming pools. / Here [in North Norfolk] you’re restless, and I feel your restlessness. / How can I find words we both understand?’
By contrast, the six-part sequence, “Poems for My Daughter”, gives expression to both absence and proximity, viz. in the first section, “Transcontinental Connections”, loss – ‘four pm. and you’ve gone’; empathy – ‘Your pain is also mine’; and anticipation – ‘arm in arm, we’ll taste the garden.’ Section ii, entitled “New Romance”, shows a motherly interest in, and even concern for, her daughter’s relationship with a Los Angeles professor, ‘his wives and lovers crowding the landscape.’ In section iii, “Harriet Tells Me She’s Moving on”, the words are spoken by the daughter – ‘Musing through the options for my ring’ signalling her progress towards marriage. And in the following section, “The Tree of Knowledge”, which begins with an allusive snake motif, ‘Days race by and you’re what? Five hours away by sky, five hours in time. / What does this longing mean?’ The penultimate section, entitled “All in your Mother’s Mind”, is qualified by reference, in an epigraph, to the millions of children who lost a parent or carer in the Covid pandemic. Finally, in section vi, entitled “Missing My Daughter in the Modern Life Café” – again prefaced by a Covid death toll epigraph – there is a poignant longing for her daughter who is still very much alive: ‘If I reach deep in the trees, I’ll access dreams – / your head of hair across my arms / a hug of sun, . . . Trouble is I want you with me / inside the high glass wall to share Sun’s Roots. / I reach out my hand.’
Many of the poems in this aesthetically absorbing collection make reference to the arts, as in the first poem, “Swim”: ‘The pool’s pure Hockney – cool, / sapphire and super-real.’ Others are fully ekphrastic, prompted by the carvings on the Norman font at St Mary’s Church in Burnham Deepdale, an artefact capturing the seasonal rhythm of life. In these poems Sally Festing reveals, with lyrical acuteness, how an artefact has the power to bring to life an organic sense of people, their daily pursuits, and place embedded in tradition. In the poem, “Burning”, set in the month of February, when ‘the easterly cuts to the quick’, the reader gains a glimpse of the hardness of farming life as it was in the past.
Home from the field,
he banks the fire,
stretches his feet
across the flames.
Consumed by the red and yellow,
the falling log, the gathered ash,
aware (but barely) of crashing, spitting,
he imagines himself the child
and hears his mother’s anger.
One can see here how the relief of the carving gives rise to speculation on the part of the poet. This is sustained in the sequential March poem entitled “Digging”:
Some things the font doesn’t show.
The way he would walk out into the wind,
hear it sweep through the leaves, turn his face
to test the morning, dreading a change
in the weather, pull back his shoulders
and stand inside his skin. . . .
With the poet’s eye on another aspect of the church font, it is June and the time for “Weeding”:
It’s a dream that rushes out of him
as he weeds out of mindless repetition
. . .
when he’d rather riddle mussels, wash whelks,
or row offshore in his matchstick boat
to follow a silver slick.
In “Mowing”, set in July, the speaker asks, ‘What’s in his mind when he adjusts his grip, / angles the cutting edge to accommodate / the dip and swell of the ground, swings the curved shaft?’ And harking back to the Middle Ages: ‘Does he think about the saint’s miracles / or what the priest says about struggle and forgiveness? / It’s the next world that counts. . . .’
The final poem, in the St Mary’s Church-font series, moves forward to December – a time for “Feasting”.
Flat plates, bowl, mead, stick of bread.
Christmas of course, with four squeezed
round the table, neighbours, friends.
Skinny men, their beards pointed silver, enjoying
the unmoored speech, the camaraderie.
The last stanza ends, ‘. . . Their hearts / don’t grow old, nor do the problems fade. / Life runs on beneath acres of sky.’ – ‘acres’ here resonating with the flat sweeping North Norfolk terrain so lovingly and skilfully depicted by Sally Festing in Meeting Places.
Feb 2 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Sally Festing
Poetry Review – MEETING PLACES: Antony Johae reviews a recent collection by Sally Festing
A collection of poems with a colourfully attractive front cover always makes for a welcome start before opening the pages. This is the case with Sally Festing’s Meeting Places, depicting the outline of a bather in grey-green stepping into two lines of curvy white waves on a sea-blue background. The place, as we learn from inside the cover, is the North Norfolk coast where the poet lives and finds much of the inspiration for her poetry. This becomes immediately apparent in the poem entitled, “Echoes”:
In “Cartographica”, the history and landscape of the region, memorialised in Josh Danziger’s Norfolk wall maps, are blended with the poet’s intimate experience of place:
One can see here how integral place is to the speaker’s being and, by extension to her mission as a poet. However, this is not solely one held in isolation from others, but rather shared with those emotionally close to her, notably her family. This draws attention to two subtle meanings in the collection’s title, Meeting Places: places with which the poet has come into familiar contact, but also those people intimate to the poet who are met with in life in particular places, the North Norfolk coast and sometimes far beyond. Family, therefore, figures importantly, but not always as close encounters as in “Julian”, named after her adult grandson. ‘You fly to hot haunts with heated swimming pools. / Here [in North Norfolk] you’re restless, and I feel your restlessness. / How can I find words we both understand?’
By contrast, the six-part sequence, “Poems for My Daughter”, gives expression to both absence and proximity, viz. in the first section, “Transcontinental Connections”, loss – ‘four pm. and you’ve gone’; empathy – ‘Your pain is also mine’; and anticipation – ‘arm in arm, we’ll taste the garden.’ Section ii, entitled “New Romance”, shows a motherly interest in, and even concern for, her daughter’s relationship with a Los Angeles professor, ‘his wives and lovers crowding the landscape.’ In section iii, “Harriet Tells Me She’s Moving on”, the words are spoken by the daughter – ‘Musing through the options for my ring’ signalling her progress towards marriage. And in the following section, “The Tree of Knowledge”, which begins with an allusive snake motif, ‘Days race by and you’re what? Five hours away by sky, five hours in time. / What does this longing mean?’ The penultimate section, entitled “All in your Mother’s Mind”, is qualified by reference, in an epigraph, to the millions of children who lost a parent or carer in the Covid pandemic. Finally, in section vi, entitled “Missing My Daughter in the Modern Life Café” – again prefaced by a Covid death toll epigraph – there is a poignant longing for her daughter who is still very much alive: ‘If I reach deep in the trees, I’ll access dreams – / your head of hair across my arms / a hug of sun, . . . Trouble is I want you with me / inside the high glass wall to share Sun’s Roots. / I reach out my hand.’
Many of the poems in this aesthetically absorbing collection make reference to the arts, as in the first poem, “Swim”: ‘The pool’s pure Hockney – cool, / sapphire and super-real.’ Others are fully ekphrastic, prompted by the carvings on the Norman font at St Mary’s Church in Burnham Deepdale, an artefact capturing the seasonal rhythm of life. In these poems Sally Festing reveals, with lyrical acuteness, how an artefact has the power to bring to life an organic sense of people, their daily pursuits, and place embedded in tradition. In the poem, “Burning”, set in the month of February, when ‘the easterly cuts to the quick’, the reader gains a glimpse of the hardness of farming life as it was in the past.
One can see here how the relief of the carving gives rise to speculation on the part of the poet. This is sustained in the sequential March poem entitled “Digging”:
With the poet’s eye on another aspect of the church font, it is June and the time for “Weeding”:
In “Mowing”, set in July, the speaker asks, ‘What’s in his mind when he adjusts his grip, / angles the cutting edge to accommodate / the dip and swell of the ground, swings the curved shaft?’ And harking back to the Middle Ages: ‘Does he think about the saint’s miracles / or what the priest says about struggle and forgiveness? / It’s the next world that counts. . . .’
The final poem, in the St Mary’s Church-font series, moves forward to December – a time for “Feasting”.
The last stanza ends, ‘. . . Their hearts / don’t grow old, nor do the problems fade. / Life runs on beneath acres of sky.’ – ‘acres’ here resonating with the flat sweeping North Norfolk terrain so lovingly and skilfully depicted by Sally Festing in Meeting Places.