Ruth Taaffe, who is from Manchester, has taught in the UK and in international schools for over 25 years. She holds a Masters degree in creative writing from Lancaster University and her poems about home, family and memory and the experience of living overseas have been published both online and in print in the UK and abroad. Unearthed is her first full-length collection.

In Unearthed one of the creatures that the earth shakes out is a brown hawk owl, also known as the oriental hawk owl, a resident breeder in South Asia. In Taaffe’s poem ‘Earth Shakes out a Brown Hawk Owl’, it flies out of a rift and settles in the fork of a tree gripping on to the branch with its distinctive yellow talons, its “two headlight eyes switched to full beam…like parallel Saturns yellow as an egg”. This is the owl that greets us on the front cover, startling us with its gaze as much as Taaffe’s lines startle us with their imagery.

Other things are shaken out in this collection, too. In the title poem, which is full of intriguing ambiguities, it is tubers. Judging by the phrase “a colony of princes” these are likely to be potatoes but other than that, the tubers are not identified. The imagery suggests that other things are found here too: “marbles” that will shine like light refracted off a prism when the dirt has been wiped off them, and “the bones of ancestors”. From this standpoint, the poem is full of body parts: elbows, knee joints, hip bones, skulls and shoulders. The ambiguities lie in the fact that these are probably not to be taken literally. Look closely, for example, and you will see that the “shoulder” in question refers to the “shoulder of a bell”. It is a poem full of things that are waxing and waning and it says as much about the future as it does about the past.

Taaffe’s consistent use of unusual imagery is evident right at the start of this collection. In ‘Murmur’, the imagery is more to do with English grammar than it is with ornithology. Half-way through, after the lone starling has become “grammar” it translates “in the syntax of grass and pasture” into a murmuration of starlings when “a flock of clauses / lifts and drops like logic” to the point where there are enough of them to “write a novel on the eggshell of the sky”.

To unearth something is to reveal something that was previously hidden from sight. It can also mean to discover something about someone that was not known before. If you dig beneath the surface of Taaffe’s poems, especially some of the seemingly innocuous ones such as ‘Quarantine Register’ and ‘Rain on the Sea’ you will discover that they often throw new light on human emotions and the way we relate to external stimuli and / or situations.

Taaffe is at her best when writing about flowers, shrubs, fruit and vegetables. Here there are poems about heliconias, frangipani, orchids, pineapples, pomegranates, satsumas and beetroot. It is the attention to detail that makes these poems sing: in ‘Orchid Tongue’ when Taaffe writes “I think of how / you would have held / the orkhis tender / as a testicle” there is the acknowledgement that the genus name for orchid comes from an Ancient Greek word that literally means "testicle". In ‘Pomegranate’ there is the visual impact of the fruit having been sliced down the middle with a clean cut. The opening of ‘Pineapples’ begins with a short, six- syllable sentence “Panic in the aisles” that almost inhabits the same sound world as the title.

One of my favourite poems in this collection is the one titled ‘Beetroot’. Taaffe describes it as having “the dense taste of grit and moss / in the mouth”. It is “Dense as a hunted heart, large in the palm / of a hand….a blood blister of the earth”. There is something dark, almost sinister, about it, as well as something beautiful. Another poem that stood out for me was ‘The Snow Hulk’, a sonnet containing soft-voiced phrases as quiet as snow. The final two sentences remind us of that magical time of Christmas when we were young: “You lift me up to press / his coal black eyes. I prayed he wouldn’t melt.”

In this debut collection, Taaffe invites us to take a closer look at the human and natural world, to delve deeper into ordinary things and, in so doing, we make new discoveries along the way.

Ruth Taaffe, Unearthed, Dempsey & Windle, £8