A pamphlet with poems from The Rialto, etc. In these poems all stanzas except the last (which can be shorter) have the same number of lines (in this case usually 2 or 3). The exceptions (but not by much) are "Egg" and "Telepathy". The format lends itself well to texts that have prose-like characteristics, where line-breaks aren't critical. "Dandytime", "Egg", and "Inheritance" could easily have been emotion-laden anecdotes at the heart of short stories. I like them. They, and "Ghost Walk", are the sort of poems that are easy to read yet hard to write. Some of the poems in the last third of the book are in a less lucid style - "No Signals Available" begins "The sky is unmanned; no dash or scrape of vapour/ in the high plateau of ghost ash, while grass on the hill/ is flattened to gloss".
In "Rose" a baby is "a small doppelganger", "a mirror of his mother", his lips "a perfect miniature" of hers - one comparison too many for me. "Hawk's Eyes" has "find the sine wave of a weasel/ through the geometry of plots". Gregory Leadbetter's written "I saw a weasel streak its sine-wave over the grass". I like the idea of "Records on the Bones" though I think the poem doesn't add quite enough to the source material.
Other reviews
- Matthew Stewart
- David Cooke (Ink, Sweat & Tears)
- Emma Lee
- Alan Baker
- Ross Kightly, Fiona Sinclair and James Roderick Burns (Sphinx)
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