Liardet is a poet of
unusual formal skill and intellectual clarity, who remains impressively
in control of a range of effects and sensations which draw their
interest not from variety and abundance but from the patternings of
limit and limitation. Pattern satisfies, whereas routine dulls and
depletes. As Liardet knows, the two are intimately related… In this
sense, there is something fugal (centrifugal, even) about the book, the
combining and recombining of effects that never runs out of ingenuity
yet is always adverting to that ingenuity. This is the Bach fugue, its
ability to expand and contract within set limits, flower and die back,
all the while stretching its finite number of motifs into an
inexhaustible and variegated inner space. Repetition, constraint,
relentlessness, in Liardet’s hands, have a sort of negative formal
beauty, an almost abstract, classical perfection of the kind dreamed of
and aspired to by Beckett’s characters. At another level, these poems
meditate on ideas of form and enclosure, structure and symmetry, harmony
and regimentation, all of which bear in fitting ways on questions of
poetry itself. The Blood Choir is one of the most stimulating,
intellectually satisfying and technically vibrant books of the year.
| Patrick McGuinness, PN Review
Tim Liardet has affinities with Ted Hughes and Edward Thomas and, like Hughes, can conjure portent and grandeur. Like Hughes’s own poetry, Liardet’s is big-boned and confident; like Thomas, he knows how to use a cadence to slow the reader down, and make each word register firmly.
| Frank Beck, on The Storm House, The Manhattan Review
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