Motley, and Other Poems

Walter de la Mare's debut collection announces a poet of singular sensitivity. The poems in this volume drift through liminal spaces, twilight, sleep, the borders of consciousness, where memory mingles with grief and the present moment shivers with barely perceptible loss. De la Mare writes with a child's openness and an old soul's resignation, finding the profound in the overlooked: a forgotten name, a closed door, the last light leaving a window. His language is precise yet suffused with mystery, each verse a small unlocked chamber that opens onto vast, unnameable feelings. This is poetry that does not announce itself but settles, like evening, into the reader's awareness. A hundred years later, these poems still possess the strange power to make the familiar feel haunted and the ordinary feel sacred. For readers who linger in the spaces between waking and dreaming.