Description
In this powerful volume of verse Lloyd Rees examines three key aspects of the relationships a man has with women – with a mother, a daughter and a wife. A confident mastery of form is demonstrated in the taught structures of the expertly crafted poems, but it is the astonishingly frank emotional honesty that shines here.
There is rich imagery and beautiful melody but there is also a penetrating wit and startling humour in these elegies to loss and paeans to hope as the poet shines a laser light of truth on family ties. A collection of very modern poems that is a virtuoso display of linguistic playfulness and deep human feeling. Sometimes there is an echo of Larkin in the way a poem moves from the mundane to the profound but Lloyd Rees’s is a truly original voice:
If I could build for you a perfect home
I’d build it out of driftwood and wet sand.
I’d build it where the subtle sand crabs roam
and shuffling water meets our ragged land…
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Mike Jenkins –
‘One of Wales’ most promising poets’
Sarla Langdon –
‘Probably one of Wales’ greatest living poets’
Lol Bainbridge –
‘Poems that make your heart ache at the same time as you’re laughing joyously’
Amy Wack –
‘Poems that exhibit a singular bitter wit’
Sally Roberts Jones –
‘Pain and yearning, the hopes and fears of daily life are all expressed in a style that is devoid of pretence, yet wry and subtle, rich in poetic force’