Light Beneath the Lids (Nevada Street Press, 2025) is the second collection of poetry by London-based writer Jane Lightbourne, following Bright Dust. The poems vary in subject matter but largely tackle themes of intimacy, relationships, and the nature of memory. Lightbourne treats these themes with measured precision, favouring spare haiku-esque imagery and controlled free verse over ornament. The result is a sequence that reads less like isolated lyrics and more like a sustained meditation on love.
The opening poem, “The day is silent, windless,” introduces many of the motifs that will carry through the collection. “White mist rolling in ~ we are blind beyond our fingertips, but birds still sing” establishes Lightbourne’s preoccupation with contrast and dream-like imagery. It’s a poem that feels both fragile and hopeful: the world hidden in fog, yet life still carries on. The poems are all very brief like this one, sometimes consisting of a single sentence. It’s the type of book that you can imagine sitting on your nightstand, meant to be read slowly, one page at a time.
The central portion of the collection is dominated by poems about love and desire. These are not all romanticised accounts but frank explorations of intimacy’s contradictions. In “With you, I was only passing time,” the speaker reflects on a relationship already doomed, admitting, “my head turned to you, my heart hidden in a silken box, its pulse dropped to a whisper.” Elsewhere, desire is portrayed with a far greater intensity. “Desire, a blaze of blue” presents passion as overwhelming, even destructive: “your body a freight train passing over my still, beating heart.”
Images of water recur throughout, functioning both as symbols of renewal and as threats. The river is depicted as “snaking silver through the darkness,” beautiful but dangerous. The sea, too, appears repeatedly as both cradle and abyss. In “I hug the sea,” the speaker immerses herself in salt water, describing it as a “black field beneath a blinking sky.” This is probably my personal favourite poem, as I really enjoyed the creative imagery.
As the collection progresses, the tone darkens, and themes of betrayal and cruelty take prominence. “In the twilight” contains one of the starkest recognitions in the book: “I saw you for the first time, your soul stripped bare, and I knew that you were born cruel.” The bluntness here is striking, and it marks a deliberate shift away from earlier delicacy. In “These sheets I wash and wash,” the domestic setting is stained irreversibly: “but how to blot out the blood?” These poems prevent the collection from sinking into sentimentality by acknowledging the harsh realities that often accompany closeness.
Technically, Lightbourne’s style is consistent and deliberate. She employs free verse throughout, with minimal punctuation. Line breaks and white space dictate rhythm, producing a breathless quality. The tilde (~), used as a pause, functions as a softer alternative to a full stop, shaping the cadence without disrupting the flow. This approach underscores her ethos to avoid wasted words. Her diction is pared down, rarely elaborate, but highly effective in conveying complex emotional states. If that’s a criticism, it’s that the poems sometimes feel a bit samey, and that some may wish for more variety or experimentation. It also has to be said that at times the poems feel like they border too much on the easy-to-digest Instagram poetry that is popular in recent years. However, that is largely a matter of taste.
The final section of the book broadens the scope of the imagery. The personal themes give way to more expansive, cosmic visions. Lines such as “Our sun sinks through its bloody sky” and “Watching darkness pour over the edge of the world, we follow, swimming in the ink, tipping our heads back to swallow stars” place individual experience within a larger order. Taken as a whole, Light Beneath the Lids is a well-edited and oft beautiful collection. The end result is a collection that invites slow, attentive reading, rewarding the effort with poems that are easy to love.
Final verdict: Light Beneath the Lids is, at its heart, a book of haiku-esque minimalism. Lightbourne pares experience down to its essence, often in just a handful of lines, and the effect is subtly powerful. Poems like “but birds still sing” or “black field beneath a blinking sky” remind us how you don’t need a huge vocabulary to make great poetry. Lightbourne’s gift lies in showing that even in the darkest mist, a single note of birdsong can feel like enough.
You can get your copy of “Light Beneath the Lids” here!
