Robyn Sarah’s poems in Pause for Breath engage the textures of daily life rather than philosophy. In fact, in “Run With It,” she compares the theories of philosophers to sticks discarded by dogs on their way home. Although Sarah is one of our best poets, this collection is too bland, a pit stop in her career – or, to play with its title, a pause to take breath. Friends meet on a winter street and exchange pleasantries, a leaf clings to a tree, a sneeze gets a page and a quarter of description, but such moments don’t often yield Sarah’s signature epiphanies. Sometimes the images do work well, as in the final poem where a bee buzzes the knuckle of the speaker, who feels the infinitesimal breeze of its wings all day. And in a poem about November, the poet describes chopping vegetables and savours a stub of a vegetable, tasting “the ghost of a rose / in the core of the carrot” – a superb image. The poems would have benefited from greater formal demands. One of the most successful poems is a sonnet, “Blowing the Fluff Away,” in which a brown and brittle sprig of bloom covered with fluff turns out to have genuine flowers underneath. There is too much fluff in Pause for Breath, but no doubt the poet still has access to “the tiny, perfect flowers” of her talent. mRb