Nerys Williams deftly employs modernist techniques in her innovative new collection of poems. The reader is enticed by hints and clues, by tone and rhythm, by fragment and exclamation through themes that run from a painting by Gwen John, to 'Conversations with Cocteau', from 'Methane Sonata' to 'Global Warriors'.

Casgliad o gerddi Nerys Williams. Ceir yma bwyslais ar dechnegau modern, ar dôn a rhythmau geiriau. Ceir yma hefyd gerddi sydd â'u themâu wedi'u codi o wahanol ffynonellau.

Nerys Williams’s debut collection is a rewarding bricolage of personal reflection, response and abstract imagery. Skilfully, she manoeuvres the reader through the often surprising foci of her poetic imagination. Her meditations jump between subjects as diverse as Marilyn Monroe, stuffed animals and the Titan moons of Mars, and yet this diversity is knitted together by the idiosyncrasy of the voice behind the works.

Williams’s title is resonant, given what I would term her ‘noise aesthetic’. The text is a musical soup – quintets and quartets punctuate the poems regularly – but Williams has also managed to capture the overwhelming noise that we twenty-first-century dwellers are subjected to. The reader keenly feels the antagonism wrought by the internet, television and other people. The following stanza from ‘Cypher’ demonstrates the point: ‘It is a form of therapy/Says the attendant with an unlaced shoe./Which will create your posterity/Adds the magician without a cape./Come and seek your destiny/Calls the astrologer with the henna tattoo.’

‘Marilyn’s Auction House’ continues the theme of the pollution of the words of others. As the narrator gazes on the artefacts of Monroe’s life, the objects give rise to received phrases: ‘In vitro injection’, ‘stitched into that dress before singing’. Life here is reduced, appropriately enough, to sound-bites.

Countering this are the memes of Welsh history, quietening the pace artfully. The crows and ravens of Celtic myth fly above the microcosms of villages, above the compositions of human life, reminding the reader of the importance of simplicity, of subtlety. Higher still are the Moons of Mars. This perhaps is my favourite poem of the collection – I’m convinced the first section of ‘Methane Sonata’ justifies the purchase of the book by itself, ‘sky rains methane in shards/tough as platinum bullets./At a juncture in the sky/gods console one another/a plain that becomes/the anteroom the dark.’

Williams is good at providing the antidote for the ‘crowding-in’of life. The contemplation of this alien landscape displays an absorbing imagination that is transformative and soothing to the reader.

Despite the breadth of the poet’s inspirations, the poems ghost each other and interlink to create a family of material. Mirrors, jays, baby pianos... the particulars of Williams’s psyche recur frequently as an orchestral inventory. These poems work together through verse and chorus to make a song of themselves, echoing the birds that fly from the typewriter of the collection’s cover.

Jemma King


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.