Contents:
Symmons Roberts has a gift for seeing the spirit in things even as can happen in life at unlikely moments and in bad weather cars are unexpectedly present in his work — there is even something pushing an epiphany in a karaoke bar. And one cannot help noticing that summer is seldom mentioned. We tend to be in the bleak midwinter — but in his hands, the season transcends itself: Alongside disciplined exaltation, there is an elegiac edge to this writing, like the black border on Victorian letters of condolence.
Over and over again, there is a sense that it is poetry itself that is the thing of permanence in time's slipstream. And it is this that makes the writing so moving.
It is a book full of windows — often of literal transparency. We look out through panes of glass.
In "Through a Glass Darkly", the beauty of the poem is its precision about imprecision, his writing surer than his "cataracted hawk" as he swoops on his subject, knowing his quarry. There is such pleasure in his ability to steer the poem home, to find a last line of dramatic satisfaction and unforced rightness. We tend to be in the bleak midwinter — but in his hands, the season transcends itself: Alongside disciplined exaltation, there is an elegiac edge to this writing, like the black border on Victorian letters of condolence. Over and over again, there is a sense that it is poetry itself that is the thing of permanence in time's slipstream.
And it is this that makes the writing so moving.
It is a book full of windows — often of literal transparency. We look out through panes of glass.
In "Through a Glass Darkly", the beauty of the poem is its precision about imprecision, his writing surer than his "cataracted hawk" as he swoops on his subject, knowing his quarry. There is such pleasure in his ability to steer the poem home, to find a last line of dramatic satisfaction and unforced rightness. I noticed, too, how often images of swarming occur in this collection. These recurring images contribute to the overall harmony.
The sheer wealth of excellent ideas is one of the great delights of this particular book. Roberts is endlessly creative and original, taking the reader from the present day into the dark realms of myth and legend, into impossible futures, through the strange and the irreal. Such variety is a feat when you consider that each and every poem in the book is comprised of exactly fifteen lines. This formal constraint results in a fairly dry, by-the-numbers-looking book, the contents of which are anything but. The plain, nondescript cover functions almost as camoflague for the fantastic poetry within.
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