|
The debut collection of Jeni Williams's poetry. The title poem of this collection highlights the desire for innocence that Williams seeks in the representation of experience, both dark and light.
Cyfrol gyntaf o farddoniaeth Jeni Williams, darlithydd yng Ngholeg y Drindod, Caerfyrddin. Mae teitl y casgliad hwn yn adlewyrchu dyhead y bardd i ganfod diniweidrwydd mewn profiadau.
|
|
Jeni Williams’s first collection of poetry has been described by Alice Entwistle as ‘colourful, quirky, intensely imagined but above all deeply compassionate’.
Being the Famous Ones is a slim volume of acutely observed scenes and situations with an almost photographic quality: as I read ‘Framing’, where a young man sits ‘hunched in a blue shirt and tie’ and a woman ‘fingers her red lips’ in a Spanish café full of ‘soft, washed colours’, I was reminded of those old black-and-white photographs in which certain features were carefully picked out for hand-tinting, giving the whole picture a strangely haunting feel. In other poems, the images and shapes selected for this highlighting are less comfortable, more grimly surreal, such as the headless torso hanging ‘in the low light of dawn/its slack flesh rendered bronze’ in ‘After’.
So, yes, there is colour here, and compassion, but there is also a cool, dispassionate contemplation that disturbs. And rightly so, when the scenes under scrutiny are of war, violence, rape, death and loss. Occasionally, just occasionally, a queasily melodramatic tone creeps in and a few of the poems are spoiled for me by rather pat, formulaic endings that seem to be intended to shock but which instead kill the poem stone dead. Yet how I love these small chickens, who ‘skitter on the kitchen roof,/crow with screwed up eyes, puffed chest,/tongue sticking out with effort,/ astonished every time, and pleased’.
There is much to enjoy and return to here, much to contemplate and reflect on, much that haunts and lingers.
Suzy Ceulan Hughes
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.
|
|
Author Biography: Jeni Williams teaches literature and art history at Trinity University College Carmarthen. She has published widely on the arts and culture of Wales. Her poetry has appeared in magazines including New Welsh Review, Agenda, New Writing, The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, Orbis and Planet. She has contributed to collections of Welsh/refugee writing and was contributing editor of Fragments from the Dark - Women Writing Home and Self in Wales (2008), an anthology of work by significant Welsh women writers together with poetry, testimonies and stories by asylum seeking and refugee women. Her first collection, Being the Famous Ones, is published by Parthian. Further Information: The title poem of this collection highlights the desire for innocence that Williams seeks in the representation of experience, both dark and light. "Being God" is a crime far more overt but perhaps less destructive than being a member of Enid Blyton’s narrow world. "Welsh Towns beginning with F" brims with smiles of recognition and the poet tests the reader directly "So a poem is about you and not about me". |
