Listening inThis collection of poems are by turns humorous, painful, spiky and eloquent, recalling Gareth Reeves's father, the poet and critic James Reeves. The collection culminates in a sequence of fourteen lyrics about his father's partial-sightedness. For Gareth Reeves the anxiety of influence is a filial matter. In other poems the quirks of memory stimulate a difficult truth-seeking - about an organ-playing chemistry teacher, an Oxford suicide and odd-ball, a black American con-artist, an expatriate Marxist Englishman in California, about teaching Vietnam draftees, about selling blood in pre-Junta Greece - whilst in poems such as The Cockroach Sang in the Plane-tree, High Life and Gaps (about the poet Norman Cameron), the concern with mortality finds bleak and disconcerting expression. |
Contents
I | 3 |
Lowdown | 9 |
Voluntary | 17 |
Doggo in CA | 24 |
Travels | 30 |
Going Blind | 35 |
Look No Mirror | 37 |
Notching | 38 |
Artwork 1 | 43 |
The Entertainer | 44 |
PentelsSmells | 45 |
Pots Pans | 46 |
The Great Fire | 47 |
Daily Bread | 49 |
Deus ex Machina | 50 |
Tentacles | 51 |
Sticks | 39 |
Touch Type | 40 |
Listening In | 42 |
Douane Syndrome | 52 |
Copyright | |