Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Thursday 6 December 2012

"Sounds in the Grass" by Matt Nunn (Nine Arches Press, 2009)

Language bursting at the seams. Lots of alliteration, even in titles - e.g. "Pushing a piano round the ring road in the rain", or

Out of the disreputable cowardly conceits
and colliding cannibalistic conspiracies
of the pale summer echoes carrying
the billion-dollar kiddie daubs of elastic-winged flappers
("I love you my daring Abstract Emotion")

or

Later, the skipper having bounced us safety into Sydney
like a one-legged 'roo in a flip-flop,
I snitched on myself to the customs croc
that all this faulty weather we was getting was only the sound
of all the lepers in my head crooning
("Good morning Australia")

Less frantic are "the looming bankruptcy of/ our comfortably constructed adolescence" (p.41) and "it is hard to say where the weather begins/ and the people end" (p.67). "Ann was here" was my favourite.

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