In her second book, Open Slowly, Kate Light carries on her standard of wise, witty poems on living, loving and making sense of the two. Light, a classically trained violinist, brings an understanding of rhythm and lyricism to her work that allows each poem to be formal yet accessible. Her pragmatic themes - relationships, love, attractions and the bodies that contain them - do open slowly, and her poems, says Molly Peacock, "seem more conjured than written."
Light handles the formal requirements very deftly, but I admit there were times when the serious moments in the poems seemed overwhelmed by a kind of rhyming flippancy that created distance just when it was least wanted.