Will Eaves' first book of poems explores several continents, moods and stages of life. Common experience - of growing up, growing older, losing a parent, being in love, enjoying the natural world in all its nearness and remoteness - provides his themes. Wherever they are set, in the Australian bush or in a West Country sickroom, the poems keep faith with the consolations that come from close observation and stillness. Well-loved authors and books appear suddenly; hair-raising anecdotes and football matches become occasions for elegiac comedy; music and domestic ritual raise ghosts.
Both formal and informal, funny and sad, these lyrical poems seek out a strangeness in the everyday: in the transformational territory of childhood and the equally uncertain adult world of grief and loss.
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Filling the slant, suburban lawn A cybernaut with ducts for arms Ponders before the sun goes down If it will ever come to life. EVENING LESSON
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(@Carcanet, 29 September 2011, ebook, 64 pages, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveInc)
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This is a debut. I haven't come across the poet before. I enjoyed the poems in Sound Houses, their variations in style, structure and theme. Many of the themes are universal and easy to relate to such as growing up, loss and grief so I felt a real connection to what the poet is trying to convey.
