Poetry review – DARLING BLUE: Rennie Halstead explores the strands within a narrative sequence by Sarah James
Darling Blue
Sarah James
Indigo Dreams
ISBN 9781912876976
£9:50
Sarah James’ latest collection, Darling Blue [the lover I couldn’t forget] charts the story of a love affair. James is at pains to point out at the beginning that this volume is not a confessional piece, and that she should not be seen as the female protagonist in the sequence. It is a fascinating study of male power through the lens of a woman’s relationship with her lover, the Darling Blue of the title, and a subsequent relationship with a new man.
Paintings and art galleries are important to the context of the collection. The woman arranges exhibitions, her lover’s job is not clearly defined, but he is presented as an art lover and possible commissioner of exhibitions. In “Dear Blue (1)” the lover is referred to by the secret name of Blue:
This seems the most obvious secret name
to give you, the colour of your eyes,
the shade that strikes you in art,
and the widest range of hues I come across,
The collection has three elements. The Blue narrative traces the history of the affair with Blue, an art lover and frequenter of galleries. The story goes from the excitement of the first assignation in a hotel room to the realisation that the affair has run its course. It is told through a sequence of poems and prose. Each time the lovers visit an exhibition, Blue gives the woman a postcard of one of the paintings, which she adds to her gallery of memories.
A second element is the four poems addressed directly to Dear Blue, where the woman shows her feelings about the affair. These poems are distinctively right justified as in the extract above.
The third element of the collection is a sequence of ekphrastic poems about Pre-Raphaelite paintings that counterpoint the progress of the affair. The paintings are helpfully identifiable with QR-codes. Unfortunately, I had some difficulty accessing some of the paintings via these codes. It seemed to depend on the device I was using. The laptop and modern phone were fine, but my more elderly iPad refused to load “Creation” and “Overblawing”.
The collection starts with Walter Crane’s painting of Neptune’s Horses, a painting James returns to three times, almost bookending the collection, marking turning points in the affair. This time the poem is “One of Neptune’s Horses Drinks from the Sea of Dreams” in which James brings out the wildness and freedom of the horses:
Try to ride me, I dare you, if you believe
you could bridle my will or hound down these miles.
You’ll never come close; no-one will ever tame
or break this Neptune Horse confounding the miles.
This positive manifesto soon runs into difficulties. The affair starts positively with “Your Fingers” with the first four lines setting the tone and passion:
At the hotel room, pressing your key card
to the door, pushing open my heart.
A gasp or two later, clicking off the light.
and noise, turning on fires inside.
But matters aren’t that simple. The next poem, “Darling Blue,” perhaps highlights the dilemma of having a lover. The subject here is Millais’ Little Speedwell, a portrait of a small girl who is scattering blue speedwell flowers on the ground around her, perhaps reflecting the childhood petal plucking game of he loves me – he loves me not. The woman concludes:
I’m sure only I see this pile as prescient
of a world with nothing left to pick.
But what of the children I might want
to have, my grandkids and their futures?
The prose narrative “Closed Book, Open Painting“ starts to pick out the bones of the relationship:
. Meeting in galleries, lectures or talks, we share the passion that will keep our secret
. safe, or so we hope.
But later in the piece, the balance of power in the relationship is clearly demonstrated:
. I guess this is how he wanted things – exciting enough to light sparks, yet contained
. enough to return home to his wife. What I wanted has never really come into it.:
And the woman’s feelings come across with authentic emotion in the Dear Blue poems. In
“Dear Blue (1)” the woman speaks of her feelings:
caring that can’t be reduced
to a work text or shared
in an erasable snatched chat.
[…]
time stretched thin between
the rare flames of feeling
really alive –
tingling, touching, tasting…
But by “Dear Blue 2”, almost a third of the way through the collection, the woman’s feelings are changing:
An empty drawer in the garage,
a hidden compartment in your car,
where you stash
the mobile you only use for one purpose
[…]
I almost left you last week;
It will happen again for sure
The focus of the ekphrastic poetry also shifts. The images in the first twenty pages show women waiting. Now the art works show abandonment.
In “This Flood”, a response to Millais’ A Flood, the artist paints a baby adrift in a wooden crib in a torrent of floodwater:
The lone baby in a cradle floating below isn’t Moses.
The witch black kitten keeping guard on top of the ruffled.
quilt is a rough-furred, open-mouthed hiss and spit.
of snarls. Beside them a jug slowly sinks into the sludge.
And in “The bits we do/don’t leave behind” the woman sees the postcards he has given her as a metaphor of relationship. She makes a small gallery, ‘a collage of our time together’
. A postcard-size gap.
. between prints frames a landscape
. of bare wall
She reflects on whether he takes ‘the exact same postcards home to his wife. But would it matter now if he did?’
The change is further shown in “Neptunes Horse Dances”. The horses are still wild but there’s a difference now. The possibility of a bridle is being discussed:
Try to ride me, I dare you, if you believe
any bridle could control me or these miles.
You’ll never come close; no one will ever tame.
or break this Neptune Horse outracing all miles.
And in “Fabrication” the relationship is beginning to show signs of stress, with an increasing self awareness of the reality of the relationship:
. .I didn’t know it at the time, but I lied too, not for him but to him. It turns out I never wanted him to
. leave her; I just wanted something to change
The relationship drifts to a close. By “Dear Blue (3)” the affair is over and all that remains is to heal.
I still write love notes to you
in my mind, though the few
I sent then were for instant click,
read, delete. Nothing kept
outside your head
In “Negative Space”, the woman is ‘piecing someone back together […] Erasing his touch’
In her final poem addressed to her lover, “Dear Blue (4)” the woman reflects on how an outsider might perceive the relationship, and how the memory of it still lives with her.
If the future happened on these notes to you,
would they imagine Blue as a man
or woman? Would they understand
how different, yet how the same
this love is to their own?
[…]
Like
the way in which a past love
later lives on within another.
If you met my new man,
You would not like him.
The end of the affair is reflected in another shift in the ekphrastic selection. The pictures so far have been of passive women. In Waterhouse’s painting, “The River Girl “, the Lady of Shallot has at least made a positive choice to take the boat down to Camelot and embrace the consequences of a male imposed fate, and free herself.
Maybe her real curse is Lancelot himself, glimpsed
unwillingly. The glass in her mirror shatters
like a Cinderella slipper forced onto the wrong foot.
Or so the myth goes…
[…]
If she were to dive in now to swim
for shore, she’d arrive with a new life dyed
into the white of her clinging dress – dripping
weed, yes, but also the taste of fresh flowing rain
and how brightly sunlight shines through
when freed from a cracked mirror.
We meet the new man, so different from Blue’s art dilettantism. We don’t have a name, we only have the woman’s account of him. He is a very different man, a hands-on maker of things. “Love’s Slow Art” shows him as a creative man who:
takes storm battered remnants, beached up
miles away from home, and transforms
their curves into more than driftwood art.
The woman’s focus shows signs of change. In “Dear Blue (1)” the woman thought about possibly wanting children, but by part two of “Unstoppable” she writes about her child. In “A father” we learn more of the man’s qualities when he:
stacks up blocks ten times in a row
to be knocked down ten times in an instant;
wipes, noses and tears, mud and blood;
holds hands or a sick bowl, ready
to steady any heaving, wobble or tilt.
[…]
teaches, his son more than he knows
that he knows.
When Neptune’s horses appear for the last time, in “More Than Neptune’s Horse” there is another small shift ,with Blue being dismissed:
Try to ride me if you dare, if you think
Any bridle could restrain or control me.
You will never come close; no one
Will tame or break my spirit –
it haunts all you ever see or touch.
The affair with Blue is finally put to bed in last poem of the collection, “My last unsent letter”
I still carry a small flame of you with me,
[…]
Blue now is the summer sky
that he and I live, laugh and love under
This is a rewarding, layered collection that repays revisiting. The core of the collection is a story of a lover breaking free from an affair to find herself and a mutually rewarding relationship, told through a collage of ekphrastic poems and personal reactions. Underlying the narrative is a discussion of the nature of male power, a lasting image of patriarchy shown not only in Blue’s establishing of the rules of the relationship, but also by the selection of images of passive women from the Pre-Raphaelites.
James shows us two types of love – the mutual selfishness of the lovers and the deeper sharing of the man, and the added consequence of the child. The collection captures the way love can change and mature. Highly recommended.
May 19 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Sarah James
Poetry review – DARLING BLUE: Rennie Halstead explores the strands within a narrative sequence by Sarah James
Darling Blue
Sarah James
Indigo Dreams
ISBN 9781912876976
£9:50
Sarah James’ latest collection, Darling Blue [the lover I couldn’t forget] charts the story of a love affair. James is at pains to point out at the beginning that this volume is not a confessional piece, and that she should not be seen as the female protagonist in the sequence. It is a fascinating study of male power through the lens of a woman’s relationship with her lover, the Darling Blue of the title, and a subsequent relationship with a new man.
Paintings and art galleries are important to the context of the collection. The woman arranges exhibitions, her lover’s job is not clearly defined, but he is presented as an art lover and possible commissioner of exhibitions. In “Dear Blue (1)” the lover is referred to by the secret name of Blue:
This seems the most obvious secret name
to give you, the colour of your eyes,
the shade that strikes you in art,
and the widest range of hues I come across,
The collection has three elements. The Blue narrative traces the history of the affair with Blue, an art lover and frequenter of galleries. The story goes from the excitement of the first assignation in a hotel room to the realisation that the affair has run its course. It is told through a sequence of poems and prose. Each time the lovers visit an exhibition, Blue gives the woman a postcard of one of the paintings, which she adds to her gallery of memories.
A second element is the four poems addressed directly to Dear Blue, where the woman shows her feelings about the affair. These poems are distinctively right justified as in the extract above.
The third element of the collection is a sequence of ekphrastic poems about Pre-Raphaelite paintings that counterpoint the progress of the affair. The paintings are helpfully identifiable with QR-codes. Unfortunately, I had some difficulty accessing some of the paintings via these codes. It seemed to depend on the device I was using. The laptop and modern phone were fine, but my more elderly iPad refused to load “Creation” and “Overblawing”.
The collection starts with Walter Crane’s painting of Neptune’s Horses, a painting James returns to three times, almost bookending the collection, marking turning points in the affair. This time the poem is “One of Neptune’s Horses Drinks from the Sea of Dreams” in which James brings out the wildness and freedom of the horses:
Try to ride me, I dare you, if you believe
you could bridle my will or hound down these miles.
You’ll never come close; no-one will ever tame
or break this Neptune Horse confounding the miles.
This positive manifesto soon runs into difficulties. The affair starts positively with “Your Fingers” with the first four lines setting the tone and passion:
At the hotel room, pressing your key card
to the door, pushing open my heart.
A gasp or two later, clicking off the light.
and noise, turning on fires inside.
But matters aren’t that simple. The next poem, “Darling Blue,” perhaps highlights the dilemma of having a lover. The subject here is Millais’ Little Speedwell, a portrait of a small girl who is scattering blue speedwell flowers on the ground around her, perhaps reflecting the childhood petal plucking game of he loves me – he loves me not. The woman concludes:
I’m sure only I see this pile as prescient
of a world with nothing left to pick.
But what of the children I might want
to have, my grandkids and their futures?
The prose narrative “Closed Book, Open Painting“ starts to pick out the bones of the relationship:
. Meeting in galleries, lectures or talks, we share the passion that will keep our secret
. safe, or so we hope.
But later in the piece, the balance of power in the relationship is clearly demonstrated:
. I guess this is how he wanted things – exciting enough to light sparks, yet contained
. enough to return home to his wife. What I wanted has never really come into it.:
And the woman’s feelings come across with authentic emotion in the Dear Blue poems. In
“Dear Blue (1)” the woman speaks of her feelings:
caring that can’t be reduced
to a work text or shared
in an erasable snatched chat.
[…]
time stretched thin between
the rare flames of feeling
really alive –
tingling, touching, tasting…
But by “Dear Blue 2”, almost a third of the way through the collection, the woman’s feelings are changing:
An empty drawer in the garage,
a hidden compartment in your car,
where you stash
the mobile you only use for one purpose
[…]
I almost left you last week;
It will happen again for sure
The focus of the ekphrastic poetry also shifts. The images in the first twenty pages show women waiting. Now the art works show abandonment.
In “This Flood”, a response to Millais’ A Flood, the artist paints a baby adrift in a wooden crib in a torrent of floodwater:
The lone baby in a cradle floating below isn’t Moses.
The witch black kitten keeping guard on top of the ruffled.
quilt is a rough-furred, open-mouthed hiss and spit.
of snarls. Beside them a jug slowly sinks into the sludge.
And in “The bits we do/don’t leave behind” the woman sees the postcards he has given her as a metaphor of relationship. She makes a small gallery, ‘a collage of our time together’
. A postcard-size gap.
. between prints frames a landscape
. of bare wall
She reflects on whether he takes ‘the exact same postcards home to his wife. But would it matter now if he did?’
The change is further shown in “Neptunes Horse Dances”. The horses are still wild but there’s a difference now. The possibility of a bridle is being discussed:
Try to ride me, I dare you, if you believe
any bridle could control me or these miles.
You’ll never come close; no one will ever tame.
or break this Neptune Horse outracing all miles.
And in “Fabrication” the relationship is beginning to show signs of stress, with an increasing self awareness of the reality of the relationship:
. .I didn’t know it at the time, but I lied too, not for him but to him. It turns out I never wanted him to
. leave her; I just wanted something to change
The relationship drifts to a close. By “Dear Blue (3)” the affair is over and all that remains is to heal.
I still write love notes to you
in my mind, though the few
I sent then were for instant click,
read, delete. Nothing kept
outside your head
In “Negative Space”, the woman is ‘piecing someone back together […] Erasing his touch’
In her final poem addressed to her lover, “Dear Blue (4)” the woman reflects on how an outsider might perceive the relationship, and how the memory of it still lives with her.
If the future happened on these notes to you,
would they imagine Blue as a man
or woman? Would they understand
how different, yet how the same
this love is to their own?
[…]
Like
the way in which a past love
later lives on within another.
If you met my new man,
You would not like him.
The end of the affair is reflected in another shift in the ekphrastic selection. The pictures so far have been of passive women. In Waterhouse’s painting, “The River Girl “, the Lady of Shallot has at least made a positive choice to take the boat down to Camelot and embrace the consequences of a male imposed fate, and free herself.
Maybe her real curse is Lancelot himself, glimpsed
unwillingly. The glass in her mirror shatters
like a Cinderella slipper forced onto the wrong foot.
Or so the myth goes…
[…]
If she were to dive in now to swim
for shore, she’d arrive with a new life dyed
into the white of her clinging dress – dripping
weed, yes, but also the taste of fresh flowing rain
and how brightly sunlight shines through
when freed from a cracked mirror.
We meet the new man, so different from Blue’s art dilettantism. We don’t have a name, we only have the woman’s account of him. He is a very different man, a hands-on maker of things. “Love’s Slow Art” shows him as a creative man who:
takes storm battered remnants, beached up
miles away from home, and transforms
their curves into more than driftwood art.
The woman’s focus shows signs of change. In “Dear Blue (1)” the woman thought about possibly wanting children, but by part two of “Unstoppable” she writes about her child. In “A father” we learn more of the man’s qualities when he:
stacks up blocks ten times in a row
to be knocked down ten times in an instant;
wipes, noses and tears, mud and blood;
holds hands or a sick bowl, ready
to steady any heaving, wobble or tilt.
[…]
teaches, his son more than he knows
that he knows.
When Neptune’s horses appear for the last time, in “More Than Neptune’s Horse” there is another small shift ,with Blue being dismissed:
Try to ride me if you dare, if you think
Any bridle could restrain or control me.
You will never come close; no one
Will tame or break my spirit –
it haunts all you ever see or touch.
The affair with Blue is finally put to bed in last poem of the collection, “My last unsent letter”
I still carry a small flame of you with me,
[…]
Blue now is the summer sky
that he and I live, laugh and love under
This is a rewarding, layered collection that repays revisiting. The core of the collection is a story of a lover breaking free from an affair to find herself and a mutually rewarding relationship, told through a collage of ekphrastic poems and personal reactions. Underlying the narrative is a discussion of the nature of male power, a lasting image of patriarchy shown not only in Blue’s establishing of the rules of the relationship, but also by the selection of images of passive women from the Pre-Raphaelites.
James shows us two types of love – the mutual selfishness of the lovers and the deeper sharing of the man, and the added consequence of the child. The collection captures the way love can change and mature. Highly recommended.