Volvelle

Volvelle, Rachael Boast’s fifth poetry collection, highlights the need to remember old forms of connection in an era of fragmentation and technological acceleration. Her title embodies something of this in its elegant, recurring consonants – conjuring love, revolve, evolve, the volvelle a circular paper chart of rotating parts for calculating the cycles of the sun and the moon.

There are poems here in conversation with Akhmatova, Cocteau, Lorca, Mirabai, Tennyson and Sufi poetry, while other...