Skip to main content

BOOK REVIEW: Rhian Elizabeth reviews This Common Uncommon for Nation.Cymru


'The collection hopes to give the West Cross Common a voice, to speak to for it as it cannot speak for, or defend, itself. The poems themselves leap from the pages just like the sky larks and blackbirds and wrens and bats and frogs they so beautifully describe, all of whom are set to lose their homes.

'It is lyrical and whimsical and serious. Some of the more poignant poems use personification as a clever tool that implores you to empathise with the common by thinking of it as a mother, a woman, or to simply hear it speak as if it was able to.'

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Open newslist

Guardian open up their newslist. Helpful and insightful or another step towards the takeover of less-informed citizen journalism and media cost-cutting/ job cuts? Discuss... More:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/series/open-newslist?fb=native In other media news... The Times and Sunday Times cut 150 editorial posts More:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/20/times-job-cuts?fb=native

GIG ALERT: Natalie Ann Holborow at Uplands Poetry Night, Swansea

 

BOOK REVIEW: 'It deserves to be read far more widely.'

In her engaging review essay 'Fantastical Doubles and Split Selves' in the latest issue of New Welsh Review , author of The Word, JL George, looks at responses to trauma in three recent novels including Fox Bites by Lloyd Markham . Here are three of our favourite snippets: ‘Lloyd Markham’s first full-length novel Fox Bites , set in early-2000s Zimbabwe, takes a similar tack, colliding social upheaval – as viewed through the sometimes-uncomprehending eyes of a young, neurodivergent boy – with smaller, more personal disruptions. The young protagonist, Taban, suffers bullying and isolation among his peers after his family splits apart: his aunt, uncle, and beloved cousin Caleb moving away to a farm which will later be seized during land reforms.’ ‘Taban must resist the temptation to become part of a cycle of abuse, thereby becoming a conduit for the destruction of his world. Although the stakes of the book eventually become world-threatening in the expected way of science fiction...