Salt Modern Poets
3 total works
The Method Men is the much anticipated first collection by Eric Gregory Award winner, David Briggs: a taut, deft and elegant book, featuring poems previously published in magazines such as Magma, Poetry Review, Iota and Poetry Wales, and in small groups of three or four in significant anthologies, including Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010).
Briggs’s work doffs its cap to a wide range of influences, from the Graveyard School to Miroslav Holub, from John Ash to Ted Hughes, from Marianne Moore to Charles Boyle; yet, retains its own distinctive sensibility – a concern with the idiosyncratic strategies we employ in attempting to navigate an ineffable and dangerous, yet quotidian, world. Pylons, the blank pages at the end of a book, an album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, bathrooms, public parks, clowns and teacups are all lit at the edges with a gunsmoke-blue glow by a transform imagination.
The Method Men explores, in a sometimes disarmingly personal way, what Larkin referred to as `a style our lives bring with them’ – what we are, and how that came to be.
Rain Rider is a book of echoes and allusions, mirrors and reflections: words are signs that keep changing their position, taking new forms, suggesting new ideas, as they recur, recto/verso. Briggs’s vision is essentially ludic and irreverent, whether he’s evoking the plangent nostalgia of the Test Card, conjuring the Devil, or riffing on an artisan perfume. Rain Rider is a book of forms, of thought poured into vessels: it begins with a rain-filled chalice and closes with an upended urn of ashes. Through it all, in a returning sequence, we find archetypal figures – the Fool, the Hermit, the Mariner and Thief – as though running amok in the serifed leading of the typeface.
