Talk To Me About When We Were Perfect (A Poetry Anthology) by Amanda Huggins

 

Talk to Me About When We Were Perfect by Amanda Huggins.

Published 31st March 2023 by Victorina Press.

From the cover of the book:

Talk to me about when we were perfect is a collection of snapshots, a life unfolding in flashbacks, imbued with a bittersweet yearning for the places to which we can never return and the people we have left behind. 

These sharply observational poems traverse life's external and internal landscapes in vivid detail, revisiting childhood memories, exploring the joys and regrets of teenage and adult love, contemplating the nature of grief and the vagaries of the human heart. 

They cast a questioning eye over past misunderstandings, roads not taken, and undeclared love.

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How I love a new piece of work from Amanda Huggins. She has a way of getting right under your skin to strum mercilessly on your heartstrings, and in this, her first full length poetry collection, she does this once again. Some of these poems I am familiar with from her earlier, quite excellent, poetry chapbook, The Collective Nouns for Birds, and in this new collection Huggins delightfully expands on her verse to fill anthology for you to get your teeth into.

Reading through this collection is like an amble through the inspiration that lies behind many of Huggins' award-winning short stories and novellas, and if you are familiar with them you will find yourself being subtly tugged sideways at many points by the echo of familiar phrases, and deft touches upon the kinds of lives she explores within them.

Themes of coming of age, of disappointed relationships, of enduring love, and of loss are repeated throughout, and each poem elicits strong feelings. The entire collection thrums with a tangible air of yearning, especially in the verses that reflect on carefree teenage years back-in-the-day - and if you are in middle age, I guarantee these will really resonate with you. Her work on themes of coming of age is always particularly evocative, and this comes across strongly in her poems too.

This is an impressive, heartfelt collection, and I thoroughly enjoyed absorbing it from cover to cover. I am already eagerly awaiting whatever Amanda Huggins turns her hand to next. If you have yet to discover her work, you are in for a treat.

Talk to Me About When We Were Perfect is available to buy now in paperback.

Thank you to Victorina Press for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review.

About the Author:

Amanda Huggins is the author of the novellas All Our Squandered Beauty and Crossing the Lines, as well as four collections of short stories and a poetry chapbook. Her fiction and travel writing have been widely published in national newspapers, magazines and journals, and three of her short stories have been broadcast on BBC radio. She has won numerous awards, including three Saboteur Awards for poetry and fiction, the Colm Toibin International Short Story Award, the H E Bates Short Story Prize and the British Guild of Travel Writers New Travel Writer of the Year Award. She was also a runner-up in the Costa Short Story Award and the Fish Short Story Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, The Alpine Fellowship Award and many others. 

Amanda lives in Yorkshire and is an editor and publishing assistant. Talk to Me about When We Were Perfect is her first full-length poetry collection.