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.

Tuesday 27 March 2012

"Gopagilla" by Roy Marshall (Crystal Clear Creators, 2012)

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.

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