Kink and Particle
Kink and Particle is the debut collection from award winning poet Tiffany Atkinson. The diverse and distinctive poems cover a constellation of different ages, emotions, scenarios and locations. The playful use of recognisable and timely language remains imaginative and daring but without compromising familiarity and closeness. Rather than stealing from spoken language, the consistent and considered tone is alive with vocal spark and pays homage to the way humans shape and wrestle with their words. In ‘Dad Dowsing’ this use of speech becomes intimate and moves around the sensitive areas in the relationship between a daughter and her father, the ‘aquifer’ is touched upon but the daughter replies: ‘no big deal, dad. Honestly its nothing.’ Their relationship of contrasts between perceived masculine and feminine caricatures meets in a careful medium and the show of love is tentative, clumsy but touching.
In other poems Atkinson plays with the concept of age. In ‘Adult Thinking’ there is recognition of growing-up but in ‘Coffee shop: Tuesday am’ indulgence over a post-sex coffee is celebrated and the self-confident poet is scowled upon by pram-pushing mothers. There is however, in both these poems a self-sure sense of freedom and self-knowledge that does not dictate any particular stage of life. Atkinson has the poetic flair to write about sex, love and relationships with intrepid expressiveness and without sentimentality: ‘How little/ it takes to overturn the pliant geometries/ of sex, to loose the nerve of loving. Not /the love itself. The nerve of it. The salmon’s/ flex against the river muscle, the insane/ faith of the bud.’ The constant physical reminders of the body also bring us suddenly into a corporeal and substantial reality. In ‘Paddling’ we feel poignant at the sight of Grandma scattering her husband’s ashes, only to experience the sight of the ash streaked upon her exposed calves. The power of this collection lies in way the poetry avoids escapism and makes a life-like invocation of the tumbling colour of everyday existence.
Cyfnewidfa Lên Cymru/Wales Literature Exchange