Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
House of Small Absences
House of Small Absences
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Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description
Casgliad o gerddi sy'n archwilio mannau cyffredin ac anghyffredin ym mywydau pobl. Mae Anne-Marie Fyfe yn llwyddo i ddal lliw a manylder sefyllfa, gan grisialu ysbryd a naws lle, cymeriadau'r gorffennol a'r dyfodol, eu colledion a'u teithiau drwy amser. Cyhoeddwyd yn gyntaf yn 2015.
Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description
In this collection of poetry, Anne-Marie Fyfe sets out to explore familiar as well as unusual places we choose to inhabit or visit. She carefully captures a setting with all of its colour and detail, but also evokes the spirits of a place, the past or future inhabitants, their various losses, their movements through time. Fisrt Published in 2015.
Manylion y cynnyrch / Product details
- ISBN 13
- 9781781722404
- Gwales Code
- gwales.com.9781781722404
- Gwerthwr / Vendor
- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
- Long Title
- House of Small Absences
- Awdur / Author
- Fyfe, Anne-Marie
- Current Price ex VAT
- £9.99
- Current Price inc VAT
- £9.99
- Availability Status (EN)
- Non-Stock Item - Ordered on request
- Availability Status (CY)
- Archebir yn ôl y galw
- Dyddiad cyhoeddi / Publication Date
- 2016-01-21
- Cyhoeddwr / Publisher
- Seren
- Media Type (EN)
- Paperback / softback
- Media Type (CY)
- Clawr meddal
- Pages
- 64 pages
- Size
- 138 × 216 mm
- Language Code
- English
- Categori / Category
- CY: Barddoniaeth (yn Saesneg) | EN: Poetry (in English)
- Is-gategori / Subcategory
- CY: Beirdd Unigol (yn Saesneg) | EN: Individual Poets (in English)
Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography
Anne-Marie Fyfe was born in Cushendall in Ireland’s Glens of Antrim: she now lives in London where she has taught literature and creative-writing, chaired the Poetry Society, and programmed poetry events and festivals for many years including organising and hosting the Coffee-House Poetry reading series at London’s famous Troubadour.
Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review
Anne-Marie Fyfe’s poems have long dwelt on the role that the spaces we inhabit, the places in which we find security, play in our lives: House of Small Absences is an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces—a deserted stage-set, our own personalised ‘museum’, a Piedmont albergo, underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage—the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life’s exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go… The book opens with ‘The Red Aeroplane’ where witnessing an apparent plane crash sparks a vertiginous sequence of image and memory, ‘the way sureties tilt and untangle’. We know that we will follow the author in exploring not just specific places and memories but the ‘exponential function of tangents’, all that is implied and suggested. Some poems beguile with mysterious pageants or processions. ‘Honey and Wild Locusts’ offers us a curious inventory of objects: ‘in-patients’ marching in ‘Florentine masks’ and ‘beekeeper veils’. These baroque surfaces are both satire and demonstration of a complicated 21st century full of dark conflicts and temptations. Liminal states, such as the insomnia permeating ‘The Outer Provinces of Sleep’, also suit the peculiar physics of these dream-like poetic rooms. There are also a series of shorter poems that, in a direct tone of address, simpler language and intent, counterpoint the richness and density of the longer poems. These, such as ‘Winnower’ speak to an opposing pragmatic viewpoint: “Everyone can use a listener, who/ won’t demur, pass judgement, won’t/ agree necessarily.” There is a winning intimacy to these shorter poems, they clear our palates and prepare us for the longer, more involved set pieces with all of their carefully delineated and often darkly gorgeous imagery such as the terrifying bees in ‘Before the Swarm’: “The cloud-level shoal with their vivid insignia”.
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