Time Begins to Hurt

In a book by Pippa Little I know I will find the kind of directness one can trust. So I wasn’t at all surprised when I opened Time Begins to Hurt on a poem called ‘Churchyard’, and immediately found myself confronted with memory and a sense of recognition that was another’s and yet all too real. That is what Pippa Little does so well. And she does it with wide range, with different modes and various poetics… Which is to say, we recognise ourselves in these pages, our days, our questions. And the pages fortify. Why? Because these are honest, very moving and beautiful poems.

I love this book – it’s fierce bright poems with their fierce bright women. Scattered throughout are lines and images I will carry with me as touchstones, reminders of what makes for good poetry… So many of her poems have a physical, visceral quality which lifts them clean off the page and into your palm. The world of Little’s poems is a dark one where ‘the harm / the damage’ we humans inflict, on the environment and on one another, is rendered unflinchingly. Love is present too, often inextricably bound up with the pain it can cause, but expressed in such startling language, it is its own reward.