Synopses & Reviews
Welsh poet, Owen Sheers's first collection has already garnered much critical acclaim. He was selected by The Times as Poet of the New Millennium, and this book won the prestigious Eric Gregory Award, given to first collections. At once, an exquisite observation of the life-affirming landscape that surrounds him, Sheers' poetry too describes the fruitless cruelty and suffering caused by human frailty. The ghost of death looms large in many of the poems, where memory and language struggle to contend with the enormity of emotion. And yet, his own language is driven by the need to get to the root of physical life and emotion -- his language raw and organic, eschewing the traditional aesthetics of nature with sensual and faithful evocations. This is a new collection of significant poetic value and resonance.
Synopsis
This impressive debut includes poems on a wide range of themes: from recollections of a return to Fiji, to sharper memories of an adolescence in a rural town in Wales; from dark ruminations on farm life to tender and unconventional love poems. Owen Sheers has a talent for visual imagery, a flair for narrative and a grasp of the personal as acute as his awareness of the wider world. His astute portraits of relatives and contemporaries entice us into other lives. The Blue Book is a startlingly good first collection by a young writer of considerable ability and promise.