Keinc

Reviews / Votes

This collection bears out Rhys Trimble's reputation as a challenging and experimental poet who engages with both the traditional bardic matter of Wales and the more recent modernist poetry of Finch. His work is macaronic, switching and combining Welsh and English (and sometimes Latin) elements in both vocabulary and verse form. His words pattern the page like waves or arrows or a skein of geese, and there are poems of fine and sensitive natural observation such as 'jackrabbit & hawk' or 'ver'. Also included here is a new group of poems - 'blaidd' - spun around the sounds made by wolves.

Trimble has experimented with cut-up poems, some of which suggest the inspiration of serendipity, while others are a stream of associations and many are playful with sound, influenced, no doubt, by his experience as a performance poet and musician.

He opens with the often-explored subject of Blodeuwedd, the plant-woman who finds 'redemption in feathers', and many of his poems involve subjects who cross boundaries or slip between different forms, languages or states of consciousness, such as the cattle in 'the landwhales', which seem to drift between cows, whales and clouds.

Trimble's work, sometimes deeply cryptic and perhaps not intended to be easily accessible, might not be for all tastes but it has passion, original wit and a wide-ranging ambition. -- Caroline Clark @ www.gwales.com
 
This collection bears out Rhys Trimble's reputation as a challenging and experimental poet who engages with both the traditional bardic matter of Wales and the more recent modernist poetry of Finch. His work is macaronic, switching and combining Welsh and English (and sometimes Latin) elements in both vocabulary and verse form. His words pattern the page like waves or arrows or a skein of geese, and there are poems of fine and sensitive natural observation such as 'jackrabbit & hawk' or 'ver'. Also included here is a new group of poems - 'blaidd' - spun around the sounds made by wolves.

Trimble has experimented with cut-up poems, some of which suggest the inspiration of serendipity, while others are a stream of associations and many are playful with sound, influenced, no doubt, by his experience as a performance poet and musician.

He opens with the often-explored subject of Blodeuwedd, the plant-woman who finds 'redemption in feathers', and many of his poems involve subjects who cross boundaries or slip between different forms, languages or states of consciousness, such as the cattle in 'the landwhales', which seem to drift between cows, whales and clouds.

Trimble's work, sometimes deeply cryptic and perhaps not intended to be easily accessible, might not be for all tastes but it has passion, original wit and a wide-ranging ambition. -- Caroline Clark @ www.gwales.com