Last poem for Sarah and other poems

John Powell Ward offers memorable work on childhood and recollections of Wales. Most poignant though is his commentary on grief in the titular elegy for his late wife, Sarah. ‘Last Poem for Sarah’ contains a sequence of fourteen sonnets of ‘childhood and after’, where intense memories of joy and pain are captured precisely. There are striking stories here, like that of a mother desperately trying to appease and breastfeed her baby on the train. There is the tale of a grammar school teacher who regularly erupted into violence and hit the boys with the lids of their desks, and a vivid portrait of brothers visiting a log cabin in Ontario where the ice is ten feet thick.