Pigeon Songs

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Ail gasgliad o gerddi gan Eoghan Walls yw Pigeon Songs : cerddi manwl, trosiadol, yn amlygu themâu am gariad a cholled.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

Eoghan Walls' Pigeon Songs is a gorgeous second collection of poems: richly detailed, densely metaphorical, steeped in themes of love and loss. The pigeon as a totem animal rings true, suggesting both a down-to-earth physicality along with an ability to astonish, to take flight. Formally adept, vividly evocative, Pigeon Songs rewards re-reading.

Dosbarthu

Byddwn yn dosbarthu eitemau sydd mewn stoc o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith, fel arfer drwy Royal Mail Tracked 48. Ar gyfer archebion o flaen llaw, byddwn yn dosbarthu’r eitem o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith ar ôl ei derbyn gan ein cyflenwr.

Dispatch

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Eoghan Walls was born in Derry in Northern Ireland. He attended Atlantic College on the coast of South Wales and has lived and taught in Germany, Rwanda and presently, England. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006, an Irish Art's Council Bursary in 2009, and his work has been published widely in journals and anthologies throughout the UK and Ireland. His first collection of poems, The Salt Harvest , was published by Seren in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Strong Award for Best First Collection. He teaches creative writing at Lancaster University, and lives with his wife and two daughters in a village near the sea.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

It is easy to judge poetry as one might judge a person. When I glance at a poem, with stanzas all equal and lines clearly metric, I make similar assumptions as when I look at a person all buttoned up and prim and proper; I instinctively see them as a little square and uptight. Formal metre and structure, by definition, don’t usually signify content that can flow free and wild. This is why Eoghan Walls’s Pigeon Songs is such a refreshing read. Its content, themes, tone and free word play are not what you might expect sitting within stanzas so formal. The juxtaposition of content and form give the reader a thrill. It’s similar to the thrill I imagine you might get from hearing the Queen break wind. ‘Angry Birds’ opens the book and sets the tone: contemporary, visceral and visual, and avian in theme. Death, life, and birds are neatly presented in eleven lines - three motifs that are repeated throughout Pigeon Songs , and all to great effect. Death as part of life, life in spite of death, and birds (pigeons especially) as an all-seeing consistent presence. ‘Swimming Lessons’ is a great example of these themes coming together. The untimely death of a swallow is described alongside its burial, performed in the garden for the sake of Walls’s daughter. This poetic description is given in the context of a single moment under water during a swimming lesson later that day. Death is there and real and understood, but life goes on and Walls’s daughter continues to move on and swim in spite of all that’s been learned. The innocence of his daughter is a recurring theme and ‘The Weight of Her’ addresses her childlike approach to death again, as she described her casual plans for the afterlife from atop his shoulders. The mix of death and a child’s nonchalance in its face are refreshing. In ‘Kraken Rising’, Walls tells her that ‘life is massive’, but it’s a message she seems to be giving him throughout. Walls clearly has a technical knowledge of poetry to go with his skill with words. One constant throughout this collection is his reverence for form and a technical structure. There are stanzas of equal length, with rhyme schemes of all sorts throughout; an academic poet could have a field day naming the forms here in their multitude. The real skill on show though is Walls not letting the form limit the poems or restrict. Structurally formal does not mean formal content, and there are real moments of lyrical crudity and vivid descriptions that wouldn’t have the impact they do were they not presented in such metred lines. There’s ‘vomit on the asphalt’ in ‘The Pigeon on the Rollercoaster’, and ‘Sweeney’s Song’ opens with the line ‘Last night I dreamt I had a second penis’ – both poems with strong visual presence on the page due to their form. In the publisher’s blurb on the back cover, Pigeon Songs is described as rewarding re-reading; this is a very true statement. Eoghan Walls is both incredibly literal and metaphorical, often within the same lines, and serious and frivolous. This is a neatly packaged collection of formally structured poems that defy a neat or structured synopsis.