Carillon Magazine

Reviews from the magazine

Issue 17

 

Pieces

John Tanner

Cinnamon Press, Meirion House, Glan yr afon, Tanygrisiau, Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd LL4 1 3 SU

87pp £7.99 2006

ISBN 0-9549433-8-4

Reviewed by Gloria Moreno-Castillo

 

This poetry book by John Tanner, who is now beginning a PhD in English Literature in Bangor University, comes as a pleasant surprise. in this, his first collection, the reader's imagination is stimulated in different ways through the three parts of the book.

 

The childhood memories in South Home are expressed mainly in pieces of limpid poetic prose,

 

      There was an open mouth in the mountain. You couldn't really  

       understand what it might be saying to you; so much had grown

       over it, been dumped in it.

 

The disjointed syntax and the short, sharp, run-on lines in Road Movies tell us about the fast-moving life in the United States,

 

and over

the meadow the Sierras so

 suddenly so...

 

North Home, the third part, settles down back home in Wales to a more calm free verse,

 

it looks a little vague,

 the estuary. As if

it's an answer to a question...

 

Yes, settles down, but without losing the variety of tone,  

 

By the water coolers / they lay down and wept....

The sea had the blues...,  the irony,   Nobody applauds you / for stacking shelves at Tesco". or the outrageous black humour.