The fourth collection of the poetry of Tim Liardet, comprising 39 diverse poems reflecting his lucid humanity as he deals with everyday things in a new light such as people and things that come and go, and the heartbreak of deciding between leaving and staying.

Pedwerydd casgliad o farddoniaeth Tim Liardet, yn cynnwys 39 cerdd amrywiol yn adlewyrchu ei ddyneiddiwch eglur wrth drafod pethau bob dydd mewn goleuni newydd megis pobl a phethau sy'n mynd a dod, a'r torcalon o ddewis rhwng mynd ac aros.

Tim Liardet is very much a poet of disturbance. Several poems employ the notion of 'shaking' to indicate the shock to a life caused by the actions of others - the departure of a partner from the marital home ('Needle on Zero'), the passage of a 'longstriding girl' in an Underground crowd ('Tremble, Tremble'), sexual passion ('Charms against the Adultery').

His most sustained exploration of disturbance is 'The Wasps' Nest'. Psychologically dislocated by the presence of a wasps' nest in his basement, the poem's narrator wavers between perceptions:

At times, it seemed innocuous,
a glue pot, a piecrust slapped on pocked timbers, a
pat of swallow mud,

but at others, forgive me, we grew uncertain if the nest
was glued to the house
or the house was glued to the nest.

Variously an 'engine', a 'furnace', a 'pit of crawling coals' and a 'cistern', it threatens to dissolve and absorb the narrator, his family and his house even as the Chinese lily on the rug covering the floor above it resists it, a symbol of stillness and immutability.

Liardet's poetry is haunted by peripheral states, by intimations of dissolution and vanishment. In 'Café Ruc', caught between mirror-covered walls, the poem's narrator and his companion become 'reflections of each other . . . objects of light'. In 'Stendhal's Parrot', walking flu-ridden around Paris, he 'tend[s] / towards pure liquid' and finally, 'chewed to rags / by the light, glare white', disappears. Other poems explore various forms of loss - of lovers, a dead twin, sight, hearing, speech. Liardet's ability to spin metaphors is astonishing, frequently brilliant. In 'A Haunting of X Lovers', a woman imagines the scars made by the mattress-buttons on her lost lover's back rising as a vapour in the room:

Shoo! She claps, and like a bush full of Cabbage-whites
they show themselves as if his spine
comes briefly into flower, comes briefly into leaf
before it is merely a spine again.

Seemingly driven to push metaphor as far as it will go, Liardet sometimes overdoes it and loses the reader in obscurities. Nevertheless, I relished this book.

Richard Poole

It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.

Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.