High Heels
It cannot be said I’ve never had
lapses of sanity or taste, the short-lived
belief in a me who can stride not teeter
but if you change the way you look at things
the things you look at change
says Wayne Dyer, and it is indeed nice
for us to be able, occasionally, to kiss
without you having to bend down
or me stand on tiptoe.
’High Heels’ is from Flying Change by Naomi Jaffa (The Garlic Press, 2026) — big thanks to Michael Laskey for letting us reproduce it here.
Flying Change is a beautifully made book and one I’m taking care not to leave around for fear of ‘borrowers’. With slightly wider pages than usual, coloured endpapers and generous French flaps, it looks as if it could be pricey but Garlic Press ask a modest £12 (none of that £11.99 nonsense).
This is a sophisticated first full collection, though it does include some work drawn from two earlier pamphlets. For once, I’ve been reading from front to back, and I’m glad I did, because Naomi Jaffa has given particular care to the running order. Her short opener, ‘Round Here’, serves as an invitation into the rural and agricultural setting of the first part of her book, with its “tractors in yards, trundling across fields / trailing muck down the road ahead” and “Village halls doubling as part-time / post-offices, crèches, farmers’ markets, / pop-up pubs, drop-off centres for donations”.
I’m interested in how Jaffa is able to seize the most quotidian of activities (say, driving home) and make a poem from it. She opens ‘Have You Ever’, for example, with
driven Suffolk back roads
on a June Saturday at 10.30pm
– nothing yet dark about it,
still a kind of extended dusk –
after Exaudi at Blythburgh
in something of a state of ecstasy,
and become acutely aware
of how you’re all unconscious
competence when it comes
to dipping and un-dipping,
to choosing gears over brakes
She writes of her mind as a gearbox, about worry, about ‘Some of the Usual’. “Oh, humpback of the week” is how she begins ‘Poem for Wednesday’ – all of these early pages draw you in with their well-tempered warmth. We’re still ‘round here’ with poems about horses and about birds, and it’s one of the equine pieces that serves as the title poem. The careful construction of ‘Flying Change’ perhaps acknowledges readers like me uninterested in horses (I had to Google ‘flying change’ to be sure I’d ‘got’ it) with its self-deprecating opening:
While I’d rather offend than bore
with any story involving my grey mare,
I feel impelled to share
these few seconds from the day before
Even readers like me, however, will ‘get’ the pleasure of this sonnet-like poem’s ending: “we quietly broke / to a joyful free walk on a loose rein”.
… all of these early pages draw you in with their well-tempered warmth
Most poets of a certain age, or those whose parents have died, write about their family and childhood memories. Naomi Jaffa does too, but disarmingly prefaces hers with ‘Spoon’, a short poem that begins:
Can’t help being born
with a silver one
rammed down my throat
She insists that any privilege didn’t, in fact, allow for all that easeful a life, “given all those opinions / spoon-fed as facts.” Both her parents were professional musicians. In ‘The Knowledge’, she examines how their profession dominated family life:
Never to disturb him practising
arpeggios in his dressing room
behind two sets of closed doors.
and then later on as her father ages:
That the television got louder
and his temper shorter
as Niagara roared in his ears.That you’d always forgive him
when he held the violin under his chin
for Sicilienne or Schön Rosmarin.
In backward glances such as this, Naomi Jaffa seems able to evoke both how her childhood felt while she was experiencing it and, at the same time, how it appears to her now. ‘Rarely in Favour of Less is More’ opens with
I wanted more than anything
to return, after the arrival
of the unexpected twins,
to being the only one.
though two poems later, ‘Sunday Lunch’ recounts
As eldest grandchild
I got to sit bottom right
next to Poppa at the head
A few pages on, such moments are re-contextualised by ‘Driver’, in which she discovers both parents had been on concert-tour in America, leaving her “For eight weeks at nine months”, for not quite the reasons she’d always thought. This is a searing piece, in which the writer is able to reach in to the long-term effects of such childhood separation (“something to live with, latent / like herpes or shingles”), as well as envisage herself in the future position of having to care for her mother in old age.
… the voice has a convincing, even startling, openness such that you trust it
But adult life is peppered with high heels, a new blue dress, childlessness, sex (not many poets would risk a long poem titled ‘Good at Sex’), neighbours – as well as the death of a parent. By now I’m not surprised, after her openness so far, that she’s able to talk about house clearance with such direct self-awareness and good humour, as in ‘Set’:
When I seized and ferried home
my mother’s copper-bottomed
saucepans, it was because
I badly didn’t want them
in anyone else’s kitchen.
(Let’s be frank, by ‘anyone’
I mean my sister.)
All the poems attend to “my little life”, as Michael Donaghy used to put it. It’s rare to find a whole bookful of such an approach so very readable. I think there are three reasons why it works so well here. Firstly, there’s the lovely flow of the poems speaking to each other across their great variety, so the effect builds cumulatively; it’s difficult, for example, to isolate a ‘favourite’. Secondly, the poems are so well made – they’ve certainly been through some tough processing. In particular, I’ve enjoyed how skilfully they play with lineation, something that always pulls its weight in this poet’s work. (Glance back to that quotation above about the twins, for example, and see how she places “to return” and “arrival” on the same typically short line – or the effect of the “unconscious / competence” line break in the quotation at the beginning of this review.) Thirdly, the voice has a convincing, even startling, openness such that you trust it whether it’s contemplating what to do with some five-inch heels, getting up in the night for a pee, or talking to her late father while ‘Driving along the Spexhall Straight’.
“No”, I shall say to the next would-be borrower of Flying Change. “I’m still reading it.”
Jane Routh has published five poetry collections with smith|doorstop. Her first, Circumnavigation, won the Poetry Business Competition and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection; Teach Yourself Mapmaking received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has taken first prize in the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition (with the title poem of The Gift of Boats) and in the Strokestown International Poetry Competition. She contributes reviews and non-fiction to several publications.
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Amazed, thrilled and so grateful. Thank you very much, Jane Routh.