Reviews
Clay Hill
'All the murkiness of a Chappaquiddick and the mystery of a biblical fable'
Book News from Wales
'Liardet's poems are as substantial, as polished and as carefully packed as Victorian tallboys'
Christopher Meredith
'Tim Liardet is a real discovery. Clay Hill is one of the best first collections from a welsh publisher in years.....there is a secure mastery of the poetry line and a concern for language that is constantly rewarding....a poet of real achievement and exciting potential'
Tony Curtis
Fellini Beach
'......Liardet brings a
weighty tone of voice to bear on Hart Crane,
Nietzsche's madness, a sleeping
child, even a traffic jam, making
of them something new and strange.'
William Scammell The Independent on Sunday
'......Tim
Liardet builds large, regular, detached poems, an architecture in which
his
own thinking is weighed and considered at every line, the undeniable levelness
of voice
not hiding the ironic gravity and careful suavity which magnetises
the attention...
For Liardet, control is all, and the art lies in the degree
to which profound emotion is
diverted into the deep part of the mind where
expression can turn into a search for exact
vocabularies. The debt in the collection
is finally to Auden, but Auden's
impassiveness at whatever emotional challenge
Liardet puts to a fuller
searching for the match between expression and event, making
that not only
his technique but his own resolution of the pressures that his topics
-
including his own experience - inflict on him. The culmination is the
superlative
The House of Correction...... It takes minute dissection of
love's objective correlatives
to its limits. Every line is dangerous, yet
the breakdown never comes. It is a poetry
more commonly attempted today than
a decade back, but rarely as successfully and intriguingly as this.'
J.P.
Ward Acumen
'Liardet is very good at heartache; indeed one of
his poems is called
Lovegrief...... it's good and rare to see hearts on
sleeves in such a crafted way.'
Ian McMillan Poetry Review
'......It is a voice rich in undertones and the poems are like jazz tunes in
which
melodic lines have been dissolved into chordal patterns, remaining
barely discernible
but tantalisingly present. Whilst the narrative line of
the poems is often elliptical
or only partially glimpsed, the language
compels our attention through its shifting
exactitudes, each phrase acrobatic
and adroit......Liardet can make us hold our breath
as well as cartwheel
through his syntax......his great strength as a writer [is] his
refusal to
treat language as a passive medium, his need to dip his tongue in its
fire......I admired the blend of compulsion and craftsmanship that makes these
poems
so involving. Fellini Beach yields up more and more as the reader
occupies the acute angles
of Liardet's vision, never allowed to rest there,
but always nudged on towards new perspectives,
towards the possibility of a
vital language.'
Graham Mort Poetry Wales
'......The characteristic effect of a Liardet poem is to slow down the speed
of your responses by an accumulation of thoughtful, sometimes superficially
puzzling but invariably-clarifiable detail... I merely want to suggest
that
there is alot going on and a deal of intelligence is informing the
writing.
For those who like their poetry to have a high specific gravity,
Liardet is
your man... No doubt about it, this writing has the power to
draw you down
into its dense textural waters... Undoubtedly, and
throughout, incidental perceptions compel you to perceive things afresh,
to adopt new perspectives... Suffice it to say this is a distinguished book,
and I hope it will be valued as it deserves. Do read it. I don't often say
this.'
Eddie Wainwright
Envoi
'......Tim Liardet made a considerable impression
with his first volume, Clay Hill,
in 1988; he more than confirms it with his
second. His strength is the close
physical register of things in poems whose
textures are dense, formal, intricate
and illuminating......The piling up of
shining conceits shows how generous Liardet's
creative talent is......He
cares about poetic structure, he rhymes with elegant ease,
his rhetoric is
suavely adept and his eye is wonderfully sharp...As an orderer
of a quixotic
world, Liardet is immensely accomplished...the flow of poetic wit - and
such
wit!'
John Pikoulis New Welsh Review
'In a wider sense,
Liardet's art could be described as cinematic - his poems, like Hardy's
novels, are at times exquisitely lit.'
Edmund Cusick BWA
Competing with the Piano Tuner
�.... this is poetry of risky
association, of resonance ricocheting about strange regions. The generous
trawl....produces here some stunning, and stunningly original poems...a source
of inspiration for the imaginatively fluent.'
Judy Gahagan,
Ambit
�Tim Liardet's world is
studded with vignettes.... myths, allegories.... the effects of unexpected heat,
storm and rain .... unsentimental, robust poems of a very particular flavour'
Maura Dooley and Sean O'Brien Poetry Book Society Bulletin
� he disturbs physics and received ideas .... abolishes the
distinction between cause and effect.'
Time Out
�....a stylish performance....Elegy
and lyric celebration interpenetrate, descriptive precision forming a basis for
imaginative lift-off.....It moves through the implications of an inconsequential
remark about a mirror by Doctor Johnson to a glimpsed metaphysics of cloud ....
divergent clinical and subjective realities are both encompassed by the humane
lucidity of the narrative voice, which effects a brilliantly judged
conclusion....'
Poetry Review
�In Competing with the Piano Tuner,
Tim Liardet deploys his usual stunning repertories. There is the fizzing
vocabulary become content. Elsewhere quotidian terms are redeployed and renewed.
Liardet's long lines make for a portmanteau poetry, full of literary allusion.
Above all, they convey an intensely sensual poetry of the concrete world...'
Fiona Sampson, Planet
To The God of Rain
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
The Blood Choir
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Since 1987 when Ken Smith published his landmark prison study, Wormwood, there have been only too many poems arising out of prison residencies that have failed to meet the challenge, and understandably so. How does one exit one's own skin and enter another's; how does one become the other? Tim Liardet shows us how, but mysteriously, impalpably, as in a nightmare. He is a poet whose apprehensions have always veered towards the amorphic, the reverberative, the after-shock and tremor. He relishes gnat-storms, vapours, perfumes: not the thing that's there, but what's left after its disappearance, 'a sort of flowing yoke', 'a sort of spirit replica'. And in taking on teaching at a prison with 600 inmates, Liardet meets his subject. The instability of self and language meets a sensibility already primed for voicing the echo. The title-poem of The Blood Choir is an extraordinary Goya-esque sequence that traces a sort of backward evolution in which the inmates, dressed in standard-issue green, lose their identifying marks of boot blisters, wrist scars, fingerprints - only to meld into a single phantasmagoric creature, an organism in chains that 'drums the rubber of its many feet.' Although we subsequently meet some of the inmates by name, in poems that show a gruesome tenderness, this many-in-one creature in the underworld, the prison's underground chamber with its eight locked gates, consumes everything. And the speaker is not exempt. He too is swallowed. He too faces a charge: what is the use of learning, of language? Like Dunwoody who smashes the stained glass window, he too prefers the thought of 'bright smithereens.' Set in a landscape of burning pyres and ancient heaths, The Blood Choir faces the charge with courage. Mimi Khalvati, Poetry Book Society Bulletin Summer 2006 One starts by grasping at clues and sees them evolve into something near liturgy. He seems to say that the world and its morality move along signal fires of individual prodigies, and these may be monstrous as naturally as they are prodigious. The poems are as intimately limned as a Dürer drawing. This is a real book of poetry, conceived out of an original mind and written with a responsible virtuosity. Peter Porter The respect and astonishment of seeing those white-as-sea-foam trainers is worth a hundred sermons on man�s inhumanity to man or on the nature of innocence. It is a discovery that arrives at the window of the imagination much as the sea suddenly does. It is these sudden openings out… that are most remarkable. This is certainly Liardet�s best book to date. It is what poetry is for: to register life, to turn it back into life through language. George Szirtes, Poetry Review It is at the points where Liardet�s language begins to tug against the reality he portrays that his poems come alive on the page. His delicate, highly metaphorical descriptions transcend the prison�s desolation and bestow the inmates� lives with a sort of grace. The central achievement of this rare and powerful volume is to show us that even in the heart of prison there is the scope for freedom. Sarah Crown, The Guardian The Blood Choir is a work of extraordinary perception and honesty, unsparing with the harsh detail…Judges, lawyers and guards, whose shadows figure only faintly in this world, could learn much from Liardet�s powerful account. And nobody who believes that poetry could occasionally address brutal realities should miss it. Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times One of the year's most impressive collections, an extended and carefully crafted reflection by a poet who spent a year teaching in a jail on the way prison dehumanises, but also releases strange kinds of ingenuity. The Financial Times 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. Patrick McGuiness, PN Review The Blood Choir is a book to stop readers in their tracks, and for teachers, no matter how experienced, it is the stuff of nightmares. It illustrates repeatedly that what is registered on the retina and transmuted by the imagination has a powerful effect, but the way in which the sounds of prison life are conveyed is every bit as striking and memorable. The cumulative effect of reading the book straight through is like a blow to the solar plexus. Sam Adams, Planet Liardet's great strength, in this very interesting book, is that he does not patronise his subjects, nor does he indulge in a false empathy. The situation is not moralised over, not deplored, there is no programme for Howard League reform, and I think he does achieve the focus he admires in Ken Smith's work. John Hartley Williams, Poetry Wales It is undoubtedly poetry at full throttle, with Liardet applying his trademark elegance and exacting ear to a brutal, poignant consideration of liberty and its limitations. Though the depersonalisation of prison life is depicted unsparingly...there is grace too. It is the absence of the didactic which makes his work so humane. Kathryn Gray, New Welsh Review |
Priest Skear
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Liardet imagines the drowning of the cocklepickers, layering his writing with refrains and echoes to create contemporary dreamsong ... to suggest submergence and struggle, the unrhymed couplets shifting and pulling with a compelling urgency. The details of this human battle with the sea are recorded with devastating effect. These are haunting and haunted poems... Kathryn Simmonds and Jacob Sam-La Rose, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 2010
Priest Skear is a memorable masterpiece, and deserves to go down in the annals of sea poems... Liardet proves himself as musically adept a handler of repetition as TS Eliot in Four Quartets as he reiterates motifs, crescendos and codas. Priest Skear astounds with its athletic verbal virtuosity, coupled with alliterative gymnastic movements recalling Gerard Manley Hopkins; in Liardet's case these are closely tied in with the cohesion of the sequence and its mathematical precision and satirical musical play that Alexander Pope would have been proud of. Patricia
McCarthy, Agenda I think Tim Liardet is
one of the most accomplished poets now writing in English in the
UK. Indisputably, he is a poet of scrupulous standards. He is
blessed with profound ambition, which singles him out from his
peers. A memory of
near-drowning in childhood sets the terms for the unflinching
intensity with which the sequence enters imaginatively into the
victims' last moments. The poems are borne on an undercurrent of
humane outrage at the fatally thoughtless exploitation of the
migrant workers whose deaths are recorded and mourned in imagery
of such stark factuality... The lines pull back to the
collection's thematic centre in memorialising the lives lost to
the ungovernable power of the sea, they sound from the heart of
the passion and pathos that mark Liardet's achievement.
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The Storm House
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Combining an investigation into the mysterious circumstances of his brother’s death with a headlong rush into mourning, Tim Liardet invents the pugilistic lyricism of The Storm House…[he] crosses a tone of bewildered longing, (think of Tennyson’s “an infant crying in the night/with no language but a cry”) with brutally riveting imagery, like the flayed flesh of Francis Bacon’s portraits, and slams through a series of gripping lyrics toward the finale, the restless thirty-two-sonnet title sequence. Remembered incidents mix with “deleted scenes” to generate torrents of extreme feeling—the storm—that are framed by the structure of a family—the figurative house—left with its metaphorical roof torn off … What happened? might be the central question of all poetry that relies on memory—and what drives the thrillingly tumultuous Storm House is that the poet will never find out. Molly Peacock, Poetry Review The finest poetry collections have an internal consistency and a rhythm, a sense of order and unity between poems. Unified in the most tragic way is Tim Liardet's The Storm House, an elegy to a brother who died in mysterious, violent circumstances. It opens: "Trouble is with inventing a language, brother,/ when the only other person in the world who speaks it dies,/ you're left speaking to no one." The remaining poems tackle that paradox, speaking to "no one", yet also touching and engaging the reader. "On Pett Level Beach" shows a family photograph: "the younger son with spade, dragging seaweed around his ankles", already "about to walk out of the picture". The gruesome formalities of death appal the poet. "I very gently drew out your brother's tongue/ and placed it back again, said the coroner,/ but began to feel it might have done it by itself." Two police officers on the doorstep could have walked out of a fairy tale: "They are pale/ and gamine, they speak in unison like twins and might/ be either men or women." They have turned up "to tell the/ truth of the mysterious dying." The title sequence of 32 loose sonnets which closes the book is especially fine. "You lived among dangerous people. They were the men/ who picked the bits from your overcoat/ because they knew that shortly they'd be wearing it." The poet mourns: "Talking to the dead's not easy. I'm robbed in daylight/ of the gift of speech." This descent into the darkness is not morbid, but uplifting: "Look to the living... They should/ be kissed and kiss often and live to be a hundred." Suzy Feay, The Independent on Sunday Tim Liardet is not a poet for the squeamish, yet he manages a necessary reticence and compassion about the violent circumstances of his brother’s death by presenting them as a “mysterious dying” that first the family had to strive to understand, and now his readers need to comprehend, by piecing together the details he gradually divulges in these painfully direct and powerful poems. Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times The poems do not merely dramatise a loss or suffering, they embroil, assault, challenge the reader at every turn. Part of Liardet’s craft is to keep changing the lens, especially in terms of address and angle, to allow some form of communication with the ‘untalkative’ dead. The resultant poems reverberate and fascinate, as in the aftermath of trauma. We feel the two movements of tragedy; the movement towards the victims—the pity, and the attempted movement away—the fear. There is also the consideration of the limits of language (‘the mouthful of words’, as it is put in the first poem and in the fifth sonnet of the sonnet sequence) and its relation to a noble silence in elegy. Liardet shows time and time again a struggle with language to move us away from any form of ‘solution’. He ranges over phenomena and situations that fuse psychological distress with the sensations and experiences of the world. Peter Carpenter, The London Magazine 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, The Manhattan Review Liardet pulls off a genuine, agonisingly won tour-de-force. The collection is bravely written; nothing is spared, the tone never falters, yet the confrontation with the brother’s death shows such compassion, such empathy that the shocking material never diminishes into bathos or sensational melodrama. Indeed, it is Liardet’s quiet strength…that maximises the power of this taut, complex book. The Storm House recalls TS Eliot’s Four Quartets in its musical structure, its devices of repetition and paradox…the structure of the whole sequence is symmetrical, mathematically ingenious as the final thirty-two sonnets reflect on the first part and mirror it cleverly… each sonnet is built to contain the emotional weight that is so personal it becomes impersonal, delicately and subtly picking up images and themes from the first half of the book which appeared in a variety of forms…[they] comprise a jagged kind of music contrasting with the full orchestra of the sonnets in the second half. Patricia McCarthy, Agenda Poignant, deeply intelligent poems. From “the gongs of lily pads” to “Self Portrait with Patio Flames”, their beguiling language matches the originality of their approach to both the surfaces of world and the depths of family relationships. Ruth Padel It is rare for a book of poems to bring an original and deeply poetic talent to a human story as Tim Liardet does in this collection. There is horror in the story he tells, but Liardet takes the horror to its storm-lit root. The Storm House is a book of poems like no other, it is true poetry, sensationally assembled. Peter Porter Tim Liardet makes the human macabre dazzle in the dark. Gwyneth Lewis |