Debbie Walsh is a talented poet, with an MA from Edge Hill University. In regards to her own work, she describes it as such:
... 'The work I try to represent spans the invisible space between sensory response and syntactical elaboration. The tense, tone and meaning are often juxtaposed between space and silence – representing the place beyond words that cannot be felt fully or measured precisely'.
I have been lucky enough to receive a thoughtful and detailed review from Debbie of my new book!
THIS IS NOT A SPECTACLE by Isabelle Kenyon is a chapbook that penetrates deep into the social psyche through the textual augmentation of its words and themes.
The opening poem ‘billows’ with stayed emotions of love and of loss. The focus is loss and the relative isolation of the ‘I’ since that time, which is translated through the architecture of the poem:
‘…Green Light/Green-so you walked, flew, crumbled,/broken but you/Only wanted to talk about me,/…’
The poems relating to the everyday experience of being a woman are signposted via the rhetoric of objectification and submission using text to shout out and Kenyon is unafraid to challenge political language and badge wearing:
‘… THAT I OBJECT TO, /WE ALL DO,/ US ‘FEMI-NAZIS,’/US ‘OPINIONATED WOMEN,’/…SO IT MUST BE ENGLISH POLITENESS,/SOCIAL NICETIES WHEN I PICK UP MY RAZOR,/WET IT,/APPLY -/…
All these poems are demarcated for dramatic impact and make use of linguistic connotations, the choreography of meaning, which opens the potential of the poems to renew each time they are read.
The collection is moreover a eulogy to Kenyon’s grandmother and pays tribute to the politics she believed in and the private issues that punctuated her life: war, disaffection, disability, age, feminism, poverty, equality and the environment.
The typography within this chapbook lends itself to visual display and offers further potential to expand and unpack the headline themes.
A worthy and promising collection.
Debbie Walsh MA
Her book can be bought here: http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/nimbusmovements.html