Sweeping the Light Back into the Mirror salutes the metaphysical requirements of the classic elegy by disrupting the material limitations of the human body. Shepherdson views the body as a ‘crumpled letter of introduction’; a vehicle destined for multiple transformations. In several poems, the son’s devotion to his mother approaches iconic or archetypal status, resonating with powerful imagery from Judaism and Christianity. Lines from the poem ‘No. 01’, for example, ‘we plant one foot in the mouths of both parents / this is the germination of memory’, recall the legend of Seth, son of Adam, planting a branch from the Garden of Eden in his deceased father’s mouth. In the exquisite piece, ‘No. 19’, the son, now forty, thinks back to a boyhood incident in which his mother was stung by a hornet. If it happened today, he muses, ‘i would have rubbed your swollen foot with ice and vinegar / dried it softly with the hair from your middle name’.

‘[Y]ou had faith / i had you’, notes poem ‘No. 57’. Through-out the collection, Shepherdson hints that his personal ‘gods’ are not to be found in organised religion, but in the contemplation and observation of his mother’s places of belonging in the earthly systems of renewal and return; and that, in writing (or reading) about grief, we might sometimes be gripped by an almost shocking beauty: we might ‘opalise our hands in the womb of this battered earth’.