Accidental Fruit is about the almost seen, the half remembered and the not quite touched, the silent collisions of past and present and the perpetual interweaving of childhood and age. It registers death as the moment where lived experience is transformed into history. But it is equally preoccupied with the absurdities of the school run and the small satisfactions of village gossip, the way the trees move on a windy day, and its own impossible efforts to pin down the sea.
“Sensed in the wind, Carolyn Oulton’s poems seek to weave fleeting glimpses, distant voices and material traces back together into a whole. The lyric voice is mother, academic, daughter and these different tones are called together into balance and imbued with grace. An attention to the detail of worldly life and the inevitable limits of poetic description, paradoxically, evoke a greater mystery, the sea on the horizon, the shifts in the light. Beautiful and searching these poems look for meaning in absences and do find it there, though out of sight and elsewhere.”
Eleanor Rees
“Carolyn Oulton’s world is meticulously observed and set down with a clarity that pierces the surface of things. Fresh, beautifully controlled and with a knack of transforming the quotidian Accidental Fruit brims with memory, daily rhythms, landscape, history and humanity; as engaging as it is accomplished.”
Jan Fortune