Composition in White

At the start of her ninth decade, S.J. Litherland traces the red threads running through her long life, back to a Warwickshire childhood spent in country lanes and air raid shelters, and before that the ghosts of the Levellers and Diggers, the 1848 ‘Springtime of the Nations’ and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, whose frail free spirit was famously celebrated in Malevich’s Composition in White. Her seventh collection is also a secret book of England, cricket and Morris dancing, Brummie aunts and Bohemian artists and the long shadow of the war years, a state of the nation archive of a life-long socialist. What seems essential is to keep the pages open, so what is lost, or on the verge of being lost, is not forgotten.