Having had a power-cut at 1pm today I took this unexpected opportunity to forgo lunchtime TV’s awful news to read instead these poems that recount with delightful alluding the routines and journeys of the alphabetically-restricted-named personas who become each individual poem’s title.

With the power now back on I can type and post, so here is a quick appreciation: in reading where a San Francisco room [motel/hotel presumably] is ‘strewn with fliers from Liverpool’ [jenny] I was taken by the symbiotic experience of how such unexpected events can happen anywhere, like a comet called rebecca who/that ‘collides with a poem’ – and the further information that she says

‘pistachio always tastes like the moon’
[rebecca]

reinforces this, surely?

Reading in another that ruby ‘paints my room chilli pepper red’ which then colour-transforms to

‘….when we kiss
i can’t stop thinking how blue the sky is’
[ruby]

the liquid transition between these first and last lines of the poem is the more poetic and romantic, conveying beyond the unexpected so it is the often lyrical which roots us to our engagement, whereas back to rebecca, similar is occurring

‘watch wave by wave wave by in the blue of her eyes’

I’m not saying rupert [as in loydell] isn’t as gracefully and romantically alluring as either ruby or rebecca, but his involvement in the roll of alluding in these poems may lack a colour reference when it does draw our attention to its unexpected revelation

‘graffiti sprayed in french       your mother sucks bears
[rupert]

I feel compelled in concluding this hopefully tempting and intentional snapshot to sustain some equilibrium with a return to ‘j’, and this from jacanda addresses its moment so, again through colour

‘like lavender mist the eye is drawn to horizons’

and this from jaako [the name, incidentally, of a boar whose back I massaged with a screwdriver – he loved it – when looking after pigs] presents yet another example of surprise and unexpected solace

‘to the ornate sound
of harpsichords

recorded on cassette’

This is the joyful reading of dancing between and among the r’s and j’s of these poems in their playful reciprocations, ‘the product of mimesis’ being a poetic capture of the collaborating imaginations of Baylis and Taylor.

To get a copy, go here.