"Gen" by Jonathan Edwards (Seren, 2018)

Poems from The High Window, The Interpreter's House, The North, Orbis, Poetry Review, Southword, etc. Poems in the book were 1st in Ledbury and Oxford Brookes competitions! He reminds me of Paul Farley in his knack for metaphors - in the first poem there's "washing on a line impersonates a ship ... in full sail", "daffodils in yellow post-op canine collars", etc.

I've doubts about his line-breaks. "Runt" is prose laid out as prose, with an easily guessed punch-line. "Valleys Village as a Tourist Attraction" sound like a prose flight-of-fancy. Elsewhere he knows how to make text sound like a poem -

• he likes adding a bit of rhyme to poem endings
• about a quarter of the poems involve repetition in the final line or two - "bow down, bow down, the young, the young", "before he turns away/ before he walks again into the dark", "how we sang his name. Ben Johnson. How we loved him, for a day", "filling/ and filling up the world with his own breath", "someone better answer it -// someone better answer it, and soon", "The empty air. The empty air", "Myself, myself, myself", "raising and raising a glass to his own lips", "and wash the world, and wash the world away", "And now pause there. And now, oh now, pause there"

"Giraffe" demonstrates the template -

• It begins with "So there you are. Your record-breaking neck's/ your thing, your USP". The "So there you are" phrase (later there's "and here you are") is a theme of the book. The verses are 4-lined. The first line is iambic pentameter. The language is unpretentious.
• Then there's some imagery. Usually there's a good one - in this case "when you get/ up you climb the staircase of yourself". The pentameter has loosened.
• At the end there's the message - "it's then I see what all this is about:/ the you beneath the surface, trapped inside,/ the me that's in you, trying to get out".

Suddenly rhyme has broken out. The imagery's not Martian or surprising enough for my tastes, so the poem needed an ending of this sort. It's a pleasant poem, accessible, suitable for readings.

He cares about endings. "Autumn song" ends with "Trees turn themselves to skeletons,/ do shadow puppets in the sun,/ and make a bride of everyone/ on our late autumn street,/ by throwing their confetti at our feet."

To his anecdotes he injects "look", "there" and "here" - "So there he is look, there behind the wheel"; "So here he is" - to increase immediacy, and he uses the present tense. "My Mother Cuts Her Arm, 1955" has the plot of a good anecdote. Its poetry is skin-deep.

Here's the end of "Gen"

[...] For every word they've #'d or abbreviated, each god they've never worshipped, every song they've downloaded, shook their arses to or sung, I say bow down, bow down, the young, the young.

No doubt he'd considered "txted" rather than the mouthful "abbreviated". However it's the meaning of the passage as a whole that I struggle with. Is he saying that they should respect more things that they take for granted? Why bow down for rather than "bow before"? Why respect Zeus? And why the Generation/Knowledge double-meaning of the title?

I like "Newport Talking". "One Fine Day" is a sestina. "Postman" isn't good. "Girl" is interesting. "When I'm Gone" depends too heavily on its punch-line. So does "The Bicycle" - the 3rd stanza in particular plays for time. The final "Song" seems weak to me.

Other reviews

• Sophie Baggot (Edwards finds reasons to empathise with all manner of objects and animals; anthropomorphism is his speciality. [...] The poems about Newport and the landlord fall in the third chapter, and are Edwards’ very strongest [...] my disappointment in this last chapter does not negate what is, on the whole, a stimulating collection)
• Steve Whitaker (Edwards’ easy iambics suit the conversational style of his delivery.)
• Ben Wilkinson (There is something of the late Michael Donaghy about Edwards’s simpatico voice, and like Donaghy he is at his best when he leads us astray. [...] Touching character portraits reiterate why Edwards has won plaudits, but the acerbic edge that pervades Gen also suggests a new direction.)
• Zoë Wells (The anthropomorphic poems in this second part, alongside the physical structures and cities of the third part, are where Edwards’s mastery really shines through)