Poetry review – LIZZARD LOOKS
Will Yeoman praises both the craft and the choice of themes in Prue Chamberlayne’s new collection
Lizzard Looks
Prue Chamberlayne
Arc Publications
ISBN: 978-1-911469-96-4
77 pages £10.99
This is Prue Chamberlayne’s first substantial collection since 2019’s self-published Locks Rust; in between was the superb chapbook Beware the Truth That’s Manacled (erbacce-press, 2022), reviewed by Harriet Thistlethwaite here. While slavery and race relations lie at the troubled heart of that sonnet sequence, the four sections of the more formally and thematically varied Lizzard Looks comprise poems which sing singly, in unison, or harmony, nature’s art and art’s nature. And the history arising from the tension between them.
The four sections – Seasoned Script, Elemental, What the Angel Might Have Said in Response and Air’s so much More than Empty Space – ring like a loose riff off the four elements with the aether, the quintessence, being Chamberlayne’s persistent music.
There are core themes. Brokenness can be a blessing, or at least an opportunity for creation: ‘Damage need not be a cause for lamentation’; ‘oracular patterns, hieroglyphs that glint / on cups and bowls, kintsugi traced with fingertips.’ These quotes come from “Lifelines”, an opening poem which reads as both manifesto and apologia.
Relatedly, there is resilience in the face of life’s fragility. In “Droplets on a Jolted Glass”, Chamberlayne argues that humans, like water on a ‘sheer cliff,’ must ‘feel we’re held / to keep our ground’. Conversely, “Force in Frailty” shows resilience, noting how from ‘pollards axed… a forest of fine shoots has sprouted’.
Often, wonder trumps science, awe overcomes mere measurement. “For Facts or Artistry?” notes that while ‘(m)etrics astound,’ one must ‘pause to wonder’; “Mutual Inquiry” suggests that ‘surprise (is) our engine of inquiry’.
Beauty and the sublime neither trump the other nor cancel each other out. Nature is exquisite and unsettling. “While Picking Tarragon” explores the ‘mordant intertwining / of beauty and terror’ felt when encountering a snake’s ‘lace-like skin’. ‘Mordant’ is a good word, denoting both biting and an ornament in music.
There are recurring subjects, too. Chamberlayne loves to zoom in on the minutiae of animals, plants and other natural phenomena. In “Mutual Inquiry,” she observes a lizard as a ‘glide of silk’ and ‘tiny tesserae’. “Droplets on a Jolted Glass” focuses on three water droplets as ‘perfect hemispheres’ with ‘black pupils seeking mine’ – shades of Donne!
The portrayal of art, craft and manual labour, the physical act of making, is evidently as vital as it was for Heaney. The art of kintsugi has already been addressed in “Lifelines”; in “What We Still Seek” today’s ‘keyboard skills’ are compared with the ancestral work of those who ‘cobbled shoes, pared hooves, laid hedges’. In “The Afterlife of Vineyard Ledges” there are ancient walls where ‘stone as stitch (is) distinct’.
Many of the poems bridge past and present through historical and cultural legacies. “Off Smugglers’ Lane at Chichester Harbour” evokes historical ‘shadows’ through sensory details like ‘cognac,’ while “Return of History” addresses the ‘mansions from slave-based wealth’ that loom in the landscape.
Such themes and subjects are articulated with a sure sense of dance, of echo, of timbre. Listen to the gloriously sibilant ‘Sun-sidle of the script’s sedate’ in “Seasoned Script”, which tunes the ear for the following startling image of a ‘pavane of birds’ – the name of that courtly dance said to derive from the Italian word for ‘peacock’.
Beyond such delicious music is the elaborate use of metaphor and simile. In “What We Still Seek,” hands are ‘eloquent as faces of Madonnas’; in “Fluorescence”, a crystal face is like ‘pale quince jelly’. “Morphosis” describes the tide as ‘silvered veil / weightless as Venus in the shell’.
Chamberlayne often enlists scientific and technical diction to ground abstract themes with a physical precision. “Droplets on a Jolted Glass” uses ‘meniscus’ and ‘tension,’ while “At Lake Level” lists specific minerals like ‘feldspar, hornblade, mica’.
Nature is given agency through personification. In “Cloven,” a garlic clove’s ‘chiffon skin defies the knife tip,’; “Silent One” describes a jay’s ‘requesting / restitution’ for a lost nest. This last is also the perfect poem with which to end this questing, questioning but above all humane collection: for here is also personification in reverse, poet become bird, inconsolable, tree-home no more:
A fortnight long this honouring
continues, lament for lives, appeal for recognition
of collateral in opening space for skies.
One cannot help but feel Chamberlayne deems this the essential role of the poet, too.
Mar 23 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Prue Chamberlayne
Poetry review – LIZZARD LOOKS
Will Yeoman praises both the craft and the choice of themes in Prue Chamberlayne’s new collection
Lizzard Looks
Prue Chamberlayne
Arc Publications
ISBN: 978-1-911469-96-4
77 pages £10.99
This is Prue Chamberlayne’s first substantial collection since 2019’s self-published Locks Rust; in between was the superb chapbook Beware the Truth That’s Manacled (erbacce-press, 2022), reviewed by Harriet Thistlethwaite here. While slavery and race relations lie at the troubled heart of that sonnet sequence, the four sections of the more formally and thematically varied Lizzard Looks comprise poems which sing singly, in unison, or harmony, nature’s art and art’s nature. And the history arising from the tension between them.
The four sections – Seasoned Script, Elemental, What the Angel Might Have Said in Response and Air’s so much More than Empty Space – ring like a loose riff off the four elements with the aether, the quintessence, being Chamberlayne’s persistent music.
There are core themes. Brokenness can be a blessing, or at least an opportunity for creation: ‘Damage need not be a cause for lamentation’; ‘oracular patterns, hieroglyphs that glint / on cups and bowls, kintsugi traced with fingertips.’ These quotes come from “Lifelines”, an opening poem which reads as both manifesto and apologia.
Relatedly, there is resilience in the face of life’s fragility. In “Droplets on a Jolted Glass”, Chamberlayne argues that humans, like water on a ‘sheer cliff,’ must ‘feel we’re held / to keep our ground’. Conversely, “Force in Frailty” shows resilience, noting how from ‘pollards axed… a forest of fine shoots has sprouted’.
Often, wonder trumps science, awe overcomes mere measurement. “For Facts or Artistry?” notes that while ‘(m)etrics astound,’ one must ‘pause to wonder’; “Mutual Inquiry” suggests that ‘surprise (is) our engine of inquiry’.
Beauty and the sublime neither trump the other nor cancel each other out. Nature is exquisite and unsettling. “While Picking Tarragon” explores the ‘mordant intertwining / of beauty and terror’ felt when encountering a snake’s ‘lace-like skin’. ‘Mordant’ is a good word, denoting both biting and an ornament in music.
There are recurring subjects, too. Chamberlayne loves to zoom in on the minutiae of animals, plants and other natural phenomena. In “Mutual Inquiry,” she observes a lizard as a ‘glide of silk’ and ‘tiny tesserae’. “Droplets on a Jolted Glass” focuses on three water droplets as ‘perfect hemispheres’ with ‘black pupils seeking mine’ – shades of Donne!
The portrayal of art, craft and manual labour, the physical act of making, is evidently as vital as it was for Heaney. The art of kintsugi has already been addressed in “Lifelines”; in “What We Still Seek” today’s ‘keyboard skills’ are compared with the ancestral work of those who ‘cobbled shoes, pared hooves, laid hedges’. In “The Afterlife of Vineyard Ledges” there are ancient walls where ‘stone as stitch (is) distinct’.
Many of the poems bridge past and present through historical and cultural legacies. “Off Smugglers’ Lane at Chichester Harbour” evokes historical ‘shadows’ through sensory details like ‘cognac,’ while “Return of History” addresses the ‘mansions from slave-based wealth’ that loom in the landscape.
Such themes and subjects are articulated with a sure sense of dance, of echo, of timbre. Listen to the gloriously sibilant ‘Sun-sidle of the script’s sedate’ in “Seasoned Script”, which tunes the ear for the following startling image of a ‘pavane of birds’ – the name of that courtly dance said to derive from the Italian word for ‘peacock’.
Beyond such delicious music is the elaborate use of metaphor and simile. In “What We Still Seek,” hands are ‘eloquent as faces of Madonnas’; in “Fluorescence”, a crystal face is like ‘pale quince jelly’. “Morphosis” describes the tide as ‘silvered veil / weightless as Venus in the shell’.
Chamberlayne often enlists scientific and technical diction to ground abstract themes with a physical precision. “Droplets on a Jolted Glass” uses ‘meniscus’ and ‘tension,’ while “At Lake Level” lists specific minerals like ‘feldspar, hornblade, mica’.
Nature is given agency through personification. In “Cloven,” a garlic clove’s ‘chiffon skin defies the knife tip,’; “Silent One” describes a jay’s ‘requesting / restitution’ for a lost nest. This last is also the perfect poem with which to end this questing, questioning but above all humane collection: for here is also personification in reverse, poet become bird, inconsolable, tree-home no more:
A fortnight long this honouring
continues, lament for lives, appeal for recognition
of collateral in opening space for skies.
One cannot help but feel Chamberlayne deems this the essential role of the poet, too.