Illuminated
by bright flashes of rueful wit, this is a collection to savour. But
don’t let the conversational tone of Wynn Wheldon’s poems fool you: they smile
and take you by the hand and then pierce you with little needles of pathos or
loss, as sharp and fiery as Cupid’s arrows.
Cressida Connolly
www.cressidaconnolly.co.uk
Here are
big themes: sex and death, gods and monsters. 'I could consult The Golden Bough
or Sigmund Freud and find all sorts of explanation' declares the poet. But turn
instead to his frank, erotic, beguiling poems. Here are the traces of a life,
the passage through it, the innocence and experience, the successes and
failures, the sacred and profane, here is youth and maturity, mortality,
desire, and the cooling of desire. Here we find Dionysus, a phoenix and
canoeists from Birmingham. Above all, memory - the curve of a breast, the smell
of sex, light falling on water - fleeting sensual impressions that will in turn
linger on in the mind of the reader. I love these poems.
Anna Thomasson
Private
Places is a full
collection in the best sense. It is redolent with thought, in its own voice,
full of perception, 'The hillsides weep into the reservoir', and fine irony,
'She gave herself to someone sound.../Who did not euphemise desire with books'.
William Oxley
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