The mischievous and often dark world of Wayne Holloway-Smith's first collection Alarum exists in the space between the peculiar thought and its dismissal. It is a place in which common sense is unfixed, where the imagination disrupts notions of stability. 'A single crow falling from the mind' of the poet is something awkward left at our feet, and the 'air itself' is the voice of skewered unease. The complexities of life are jolted awake throughout this fearlessly inventive debut, as loss arrives played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a movie, the risk of romance is understood as the filling in a sandwich, and anxieties are found hunkered in bushes, blooming behind the wallpaper, and in the bursting of balloons.
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inside the tiny, inside the candy-coloured theatre open to the beachfront, sweet to the retina and wriggling, you might say, in the palaver of its excess is suddenly still as the found-out devil THE AIR ITSELF
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(@BloodaxeBooks, 23 March 2017, ebook, 64 pages, borrowed from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveLibs)
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I've read and enjoyed another collection by the poet, Love without Love so I wanted to read more of his work. This is his debut collection. I really liked the front cover which is similar to Love without Love. There's something I really like about the poet's work; unusual, playful, descriptive and very unexpected at times. The poems touch on universal themes but using the poet's unique style and voice. I enjoyed The Warning Notes, No Worries, Cake and Self Portrait #2 the most.
