Fool

Reviews / Votes

Mills is a poet preoccupied by language and the relation between language and reality. ...He is an acute and at times playful ironist, but like the Metaphysical poets of an earlier age he is concerned with time and death and questions of ultimate meaning. ...Thought-provoking time shifts and changes of perspective in the poems are combined with concentrated sensation-images that vividly evoke time and place. ...What I was most aware of in Fool was the poet's concentration of imagination. Kevin Mills is a poet with an original vision - intense, playful, ironic, deeply serious.
Jeremy Hooker -- Publisher: Cinnamon Press There is often a Metaphysical flavour to Kevin Mills's brief, deft poems; an artistry like wood-engraving - careful, significant lines cut into a small, hard surface. In 'Spirit Level', for example, "It all rests squarely / on this: / a trapped bubble: / a little zero / dividing the equals." The few words multiply meanings every time you read it. The collection also contains quite broadly humorous monologues and very personal memories. Occasionally the brevity may be a little too close to jottings for a poem not quite realized, now and then the line or stanza breaks are too contrived, but the quality of observation and synthesis is very fine.

There are several sequences within the collection - concerning a fatal speed trial on Pendine, woodwork, the poet's mother, St Fagans Museum, the idea of the Fool and (perhaps the most powerful) themes from the Mabinogion, all giving rise to and crystallizing an unexpected insight, a striking glimpse or memory. The mother/son estrangement of 'Arianrhod and Lleu' finds a poignant echo in the poet's own mother's confusion. In 'Manawydan' the magical exile of the story and the actual experience of the poet elide to suggest so much in a few lines. The title sequence on 'Fools' ranges from Jesus to Del Boy. All are both witty and tender portraits of imaginative outsiders and the poet suggests he is aware of the risks of being one: "Think too little you're a clown, / too much / you're an egghead. I have." (I would have been glad of an explanatory note on Stanczyk, the jester to Polish kings, whose story gives rise to three poems.)

In this debut collection Kevin Mills successfully combines a poetry of word-play and double meaning with a startling capacity to convey sharp visual images and profound feelings. -- Caroline Clark @ www.gwales.com