Poetry review – GREY TIME: Paul McDonald follows Julia Webb through a collection which explores the many aspects of loss
Grey Time
Julia Webb
Nine Arches Press
ISBN: 978-1-916760-20-2
£11.99
I’ve read several of Julia Webb’s previous collections, and loved them – she has an impressive flair for the domestic gothic, and her edgy, often surreal poems convey a sense of psychological vulnerability that’s as compelling as it is unsettling. Grey Time, a book primarily about bereavement, has all of these qualities. It focuses on the relationships she has with lost loved ones – a mother, a brother, and a partner – reassessing them through the lens of the present.
The opening trio of poems set the tone. The first, “I have spent years falling out of each window”, captures the potentially repetitive nature of loss. The title itself suggests being trapped in a cycle of despair, and this is reinforced throughout: ‘Every day I climb to the top of the tower / and let myself fall again’ – it’s an experience seemingly rooted in self-punishment, ‘the guilt of the living’, familiar to many who’ve experienced bereavement. It’s a difficult mindset to shake, but in the final stanza it’s the dead who might offer hope:
I wonder what my dead would tell me
if I gave them voice –
perhaps, burn the building down?
Rather than demanding endless mourning, the wisdom of the dead offers a route to liberation. Destroying the structure of grief is the only way to stop the cycle of debilitating self-harm. The second poem, “The Hare”, also explores the speaker’s unresolved grief. The attempt to visit a grave at a ‘woodland burial ground’, is thwarted by a ‘vague’ map, leaving the site unfound. This failure reflects her emotional state: the inability to properly mourn, find closure, or connect with the deceased. The speaker’s inability to locate the grave morphs into a deeper psychological burden. Again she explicitly frames this as guilt: ‘A penance perhaps – / for not trying hard enough to find her.’ The poem goes on to amplify this sense of failure with a flashback to a church setting where the speaker was struck silent (‘opened my mouth to speak / and no words came’), suggesting a tongue-tied eulogy, perhaps, or, more generally, an inability to live up to inherited assumptions about how grief should be expressed. As she struggles to find the grave she spots a hare, the central image on which the experience hangs: ‘This hare, that might be a dream or might be real’, or might even be her deceased mother (‘as big as the one I thought was my mother’). It introduces the pleasing element of strangeness characterising Webb’s work; the hare is certainly an apposite symbol here, often appearing as a creature of thresholds in folklore and literature, it straddles the boundaries between reality, spirituality, and the unconscious. The third poem “A Geography of the Dead”, picks up on the theme of elusive locations, reflecting on what it means to be in the world after death: the fact that a mother is ‘170 miles from the body of [her] son’ shouldn’t be significant, but for some reason it is: a mystery with which those who’ve suffered bereavement might identify. The theme of searching features here again, then, underscored by the closing line, ‘how will you reach any of us’.
This opening trio is followed by the title sequence, “Grey Time”, a touching series of nine short prose poems that describe the speaker’s visits to her terminally ill mother in the final days of her life. Webb’s superb eye for significant detail is matched by her sense of timing, and she knows how to maximise the emotional impact: “I remember nothing of the journey” closes with the line: ‘My breath on your face as I try to entice you back to the world’. Her dark wit is in evidence in this sequence too – “The hotel window looks out over a carpark” closes: ‘A refrigerated lorry hums beneath our window. We watch it unload its cargo of carcasses’…
Elsewhere we get a powerful sense of her mother as a living person, and it’s clear she was a huge character. In ‘For I will consider my mother’, for instance, Webb channels Christopher Smart’s famous list poem “Jubilate Agno” to excellent effect; it closes:
who built a snowman right there in her bedroom
who taught herself to fly but was a terrible swimmer
who had visited the stars and learnt how to shimmer
who was in love with the moon but kept the sun inside her
and when it was time for her to shine oh boy did she
There is more than a touch of ambivalence in this and other poems about her mother: their relationship was certainly complex, as we might imagine with someone who builds snowmen in bedrooms! But they convey a sense of her mother’s spirit and status as a larger-than-life individual, deepening our sense of her humanity. Also, as this piece demonstrates, there’s often a quirkiness and playfulness in Webb’s writing that adds another layer of interest. It’s entertaining, but it also serves to remind us that grieving is a very subjective thing, and, as a neurodivergent poet, Webb is acutely aware of this. There’s a concern for how her emotional responses might be perceived, and we often glimpse her sensory overload, outsider perspective, and the exhaustion of navigating a neurotypical world. This feeling is captured beautifully in “You rearrange your face”:
into what you think she is expecting
you yearn for something
though you would be hard pushed to name exactly what
messages dance around inside their little boxes
you can’t tell if they’re barbed or friendly
and there is a shout inside you that sometimes rises up
you have to keep stuffing it back down
it’s like swallowing a cheesy sock
you do the things that you think are expected
and then you worry they were wrong
you try and behave politely and kindly
but sometimes a thing comes bursting out
it’s like there’s a jack-in-a-box inside you
you read somewhere that if you just keep smiling
that everything will turn out right
It addresses the everyday reality of emotional masking, social anxiety, and suppressed frustration. This is particularly difficult at times of bereavement, when social expectations are high, but can’t always be understood. This poem exposes the internal mechanics of surviving inside the social world while carrying grief, making explicit the tensions that inform many of the poems here. As in the three opening poems, the speaker is often lost in various ways: she is geographically lost, the dead are lost to her, and she’s at a loss as to how to articulate her grief. The great thing about poetry, however, is that it offers a space where expectations are different: grief is allowed to manifest atypically and the pressures of conventional mourning can be circumvented. In poetry Webb doesn’t have to swallow the cheesy sock or rearrange her face; rather she can address the dead in her own way, as she does beautifully in the final poem “without”: ‘I am building you an owl’, she says,
and I wish you here for real
wish you back from the dead
wish you acres of owl flight
on soft summer evenings
all the smells of the woods
all the reds and gold of autumn
to dark your way back home
The surreal opening, ‘I am building you an owl’ is typical of Webb’s writing; building an owl out of words is an attempt to express the subjective nature of her grief – a coping strategy, of sorts, for personal feelings that don’t have a shared language. But at the close she strips away the mechanism of personal metaphor and speaks directly to the void in a way that grounds her complex emotions in something we all relate to – the impossible desire at the heart of bereavement: ‘and I wish you here for real / wish you back from the dead’.
Oct 12 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Julia Webb
Poetry review – GREY TIME: Paul McDonald follows Julia Webb through a collection which explores the many aspects of loss
Grey Time
Julia Webb
Nine Arches Press
ISBN: 978-1-916760-20-2
£11.99
I’ve read several of Julia Webb’s previous collections, and loved them – she has an impressive flair for the domestic gothic, and her edgy, often surreal poems convey a sense of psychological vulnerability that’s as compelling as it is unsettling. Grey Time, a book primarily about bereavement, has all of these qualities. It focuses on the relationships she has with lost loved ones – a mother, a brother, and a partner – reassessing them through the lens of the present.
The opening trio of poems set the tone. The first, “I have spent years falling out of each window”, captures the potentially repetitive nature of loss. The title itself suggests being trapped in a cycle of despair, and this is reinforced throughout: ‘Every day I climb to the top of the tower / and let myself fall again’ – it’s an experience seemingly rooted in self-punishment, ‘the guilt of the living’, familiar to many who’ve experienced bereavement. It’s a difficult mindset to shake, but in the final stanza it’s the dead who might offer hope:
I wonder what my dead would tell me
if I gave them voice –
perhaps, burn the building down?
Rather than demanding endless mourning, the wisdom of the dead offers a route to liberation. Destroying the structure of grief is the only way to stop the cycle of debilitating self-harm. The second poem, “The Hare”, also explores the speaker’s unresolved grief. The attempt to visit a grave at a ‘woodland burial ground’, is thwarted by a ‘vague’ map, leaving the site unfound. This failure reflects her emotional state: the inability to properly mourn, find closure, or connect with the deceased. The speaker’s inability to locate the grave morphs into a deeper psychological burden. Again she explicitly frames this as guilt: ‘A penance perhaps – / for not trying hard enough to find her.’ The poem goes on to amplify this sense of failure with a flashback to a church setting where the speaker was struck silent (‘opened my mouth to speak / and no words came’), suggesting a tongue-tied eulogy, perhaps, or, more generally, an inability to live up to inherited assumptions about how grief should be expressed. As she struggles to find the grave she spots a hare, the central image on which the experience hangs: ‘This hare, that might be a dream or might be real’, or might even be her deceased mother (‘as big as the one I thought was my mother’). It introduces the pleasing element of strangeness characterising Webb’s work; the hare is certainly an apposite symbol here, often appearing as a creature of thresholds in folklore and literature, it straddles the boundaries between reality, spirituality, and the unconscious. The third poem “A Geography of the Dead”, picks up on the theme of elusive locations, reflecting on what it means to be in the world after death: the fact that a mother is ‘170 miles from the body of [her] son’ shouldn’t be significant, but for some reason it is: a mystery with which those who’ve suffered bereavement might identify. The theme of searching features here again, then, underscored by the closing line, ‘how will you reach any of us’.
This opening trio is followed by the title sequence, “Grey Time”, a touching series of nine short prose poems that describe the speaker’s visits to her terminally ill mother in the final days of her life. Webb’s superb eye for significant detail is matched by her sense of timing, and she knows how to maximise the emotional impact: “I remember nothing of the journey” closes with the line: ‘My breath on your face as I try to entice you back to the world’. Her dark wit is in evidence in this sequence too – “The hotel window looks out over a carpark” closes: ‘A refrigerated lorry hums beneath our window. We watch it unload its cargo of carcasses’…
Elsewhere we get a powerful sense of her mother as a living person, and it’s clear she was a huge character. In ‘For I will consider my mother’, for instance, Webb channels Christopher Smart’s famous list poem “Jubilate Agno” to excellent effect; it closes:
who built a snowman right there in her bedroom
who taught herself to fly but was a terrible swimmer
who had visited the stars and learnt how to shimmer
who was in love with the moon but kept the sun inside her
and when it was time for her to shine oh boy did she
There is more than a touch of ambivalence in this and other poems about her mother: their relationship was certainly complex, as we might imagine with someone who builds snowmen in bedrooms! But they convey a sense of her mother’s spirit and status as a larger-than-life individual, deepening our sense of her humanity. Also, as this piece demonstrates, there’s often a quirkiness and playfulness in Webb’s writing that adds another layer of interest. It’s entertaining, but it also serves to remind us that grieving is a very subjective thing, and, as a neurodivergent poet, Webb is acutely aware of this. There’s a concern for how her emotional responses might be perceived, and we often glimpse her sensory overload, outsider perspective, and the exhaustion of navigating a neurotypical world. This feeling is captured beautifully in “You rearrange your face”:
into what you think she is expecting
you yearn for something
though you would be hard pushed to name exactly what
messages dance around inside their little boxes
you can’t tell if they’re barbed or friendly
and there is a shout inside you that sometimes rises up
you have to keep stuffing it back down
it’s like swallowing a cheesy sock
you do the things that you think are expected
and then you worry they were wrong
you try and behave politely and kindly
but sometimes a thing comes bursting out
it’s like there’s a jack-in-a-box inside you
you read somewhere that if you just keep smiling
that everything will turn out right
It addresses the everyday reality of emotional masking, social anxiety, and suppressed frustration. This is particularly difficult at times of bereavement, when social expectations are high, but can’t always be understood. This poem exposes the internal mechanics of surviving inside the social world while carrying grief, making explicit the tensions that inform many of the poems here. As in the three opening poems, the speaker is often lost in various ways: she is geographically lost, the dead are lost to her, and she’s at a loss as to how to articulate her grief. The great thing about poetry, however, is that it offers a space where expectations are different: grief is allowed to manifest atypically and the pressures of conventional mourning can be circumvented. In poetry Webb doesn’t have to swallow the cheesy sock or rearrange her face; rather she can address the dead in her own way, as she does beautifully in the final poem “without”: ‘I am building you an owl’, she says,
and I wish you here for real
wish you back from the dead
wish you acres of owl flight
on soft summer evenings
all the smells of the woods
all the reds and gold of autumn
to dark your way back home
The surreal opening, ‘I am building you an owl’ is typical of Webb’s writing; building an owl out of words is an attempt to express the subjective nature of her grief – a coping strategy, of sorts, for personal feelings that don’t have a shared language. But at the close she strips away the mechanism of personal metaphor and speaks directly to the void in a way that grounds her complex emotions in something we all relate to – the impossible desire at the heart of bereavement: ‘and I wish you here for real / wish you back from the dead’.