Poetry Book Society Recommendation Spring 2003

Always a poet interested in painting, Liardet's fourth full-length volume carries as its epigraph three quotes from the writings of the Italian futurist painter, Umberto Boccioni. Like the futurists, Liardet is concerned with charting movement and depicting contemporary life, and it is the influence of Boccioni, and in particular three paintings from 1911, 'States of Mind: The Farewells', 'States of Mind: Those who stay' and 'States of Mind: Those who go', which draws the collection together in its preoccupation with arrivals and departures. Throughout the book acts of propitiation against loss and leaving are set up and offered to the god of rain 'the word, the rite of growth'. The tour de force at the centre the collection, however, is 'The Wasp's Nest'. Liardet writes: '"The hole through which everything poured, beneath the rug."/ wrote Liu Hsun, but we had a wasps nest', a nest which massages 'the soles of my bare feet like a jacuzzi of fire'. And yet, says the poet, 'It was our thoughts though, not Council steam, went down beneath the floor of the towering room / and the water lilies of the Chinese rug floated in light / into the furnace of stumbling wasps / to sense something that might make us welcome at a later date'. With poems about his mother's unborn twin who remains a part of her body, an elegy for Ted Hughes, and subjects as various as 'Laws of Probability' and 'T'ai Kwondo Lessons for Men of the Cloth', this is a moving, and honest book about love, art, and the painfulness of change. Consistently interesting, always managing to tread the difficult line between humour and seriousness, Liardet is a poet whose work should be widely read.

Deryn Rees-Jones, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 2003