Description
Underneath their deceptively detached tone and lightness of touch there are profundities, as in the River Passage sequence where darker themes are always to be glimpsed shadowing the surface. This pamphlet has the weight and variety of a full collection: readers will want to return to its incisive and insightful (and often funny and moving) poems again and again.
Keith ChandlerAt the centre of this collection is the long poem River Passage. The narrative moves seamlessly from one character to another, rather in the manner of a relay runner passing the baton to another, starting and ending with a schoolteacher but travelling outside the classroom to the schoolyard and then on to the river. Phelps uses mathematical imagery to hold the taut narrative together. Despite its length, it is fast-paced and always holds the reader’s attention. If there is such a thing as a perfect poem, this must surely be it.
His poems are full of wisdom and they address for the most part the big issues in life. This is a poet who treats his readers on equal terms so that we can readily identify with what he is saying and feel engaged with his words. Beneath the surface his poems run deep. There is a wry sense of humour at work in poems such as Cooking in a Bedsitter (a nod to Katherine Whitehorn’s classic Penguin book of the same title) and Note of caution for a son going off to university. These are counterbalanced by the serious tone of Blackberries where Phelps quietly makes the connection between his subject matter in the opening and closing lines, just as he does in Oxygen where he compares and contrasts two very different situations to dramatic effect. The clever wit displayed in Angry Haiku rounds off the collection with panache.Neil Leadbeaterwriteoutloud – www.writeoutloud.net