Paul Brookes
Paul Brookes
Bob Beagrie
→ "These Random Acts of Wildness' is a chapbook by Paul Brookes, recently published by Glass Head Press. A recommended read, which contains thirty eight sonnets (or sonnet-style poems) of varying varieties and adaptations, showing Brookes' skill and control over the form. What is particularly resonant about the poems is their focus upon small, incidental, and ordinary occurances and events, such as cutting the lawn, observing wildlife in the garden, polishing furniture, making a cup of tea, raking leaves, putting the bins out, sitting in the sun, washing up, vacuuming, ironing, etc.
The form, with its strict demands of rhyme, metre and space, under Brookes' alchemical treatment, transform these ordinary, everyday chores and moments into bubbles of zen-like contemplation, where attention to detail forces the reader to reconsider the act as a ritual, where the profane is cast in the light of a sacred rite. The compression of the language required by the sonnet also produces striking images and unexpected collocations. He often expertly uses the title of a poem as the opening, and deftly employs enjambment to break expectations and disrupt the predictability of the form's standardised patterns of sound and stress. There is a Hopkins and Dylan Thomas quality to the sprung rhythm and condensed lyrical image-making, which delights the tongue with alliterative and assonantal echoes, and deserves a little unpacking on a second reading. It is also nice to see the Northern phraseology within the work, of dialect being owned and applied to the adaptable and venerable poetic form. You can see all these strategies at play in poems such as 'Inhale Dappled Sun', which copy here as one of those that particularly stood out for me.
Inhale Dappled Sun
Cast perfumed air, through illuminated windows of tree crowns, birdsong lilts blossom fall. Keys all senses keener. Created sung day sees claw hunt feather and fulsome
feathered mams rescue bairns from hungry sharp
talons. Bigger birds to feed their young snatch open beaked fluffy kids from nests, daysong dark.
→ "These Random Acts of Wildness' is a chapbook by Paul Brookes, recently published by Glass Head Press. A recommended read, which contains thirty eight sonnets (or sonnet-style poems) of varying varieties and adaptations, showing Brookes' skill and control over the form. What is particularly resonant about the poems is their focus upon small, incidental, and ordinary occurances and events, such as cutting the lawn, observing wildlife in the garden, polishing furniture, making a cup of tea, raking leaves, putting the bins out, sitting in the sun, washing up, vacuuming, ironing, etc.
The form, with its strict demands of rhyme, metre and space, under Brookes' alchemical treatment, transform these ordinary, everyday chores and moments into bubbles of zen-like contemplation, where attention to detail forces the reader to reconsider the act as a ritual, where the profane is cast in the light of a sacred rite. The compression of the language required by the sonnet also produces striking images and unexpected collocations. He often expertly uses the title of a poem as the opening, and deftly employs enjambment to break expectations and disrupt the predictability of the form's standardised patterns of sound and stress. There is a Hopkins and Dylan Thomas quality to the sprung rhythm and condensed lyrical image-making, which delights the tongue with alliterative and assonantal echoes, and deserves a little unpacking on a second reading. It is also nice to see the Northern phraseology within the work, of dialect being owned and applied to the adaptable and venerable poetic form. You can see all these strategies at play in poems such as 'Inhale Dappled Sun', which copy here as one of those that particularly stood out for me.
Inhale Dappled Sun
Cast perfumed air, through illuminated windows of tree crowns, birdsong lilts blossom fall. Keys all senses keener. Created sung day sees claw hunt feather and fulsome
feathered mams rescue bairns from hungry sharp
talons. Bigger birds to feed their young snatch open beaked fluffy kids from nests, daysong dark.
