Richly Creative/Created Time-Capsule

My tweeted review of this chapbook today was

‘(I have often wondered why people consider me curmudgeonly)’. Indeed! This from a poetic frolic through the liveliest imagination around, a dense narrative that never cloys in its relentless revelations of a holiday’s escapades. Truly delightful.

and that is as focused and meaningful as it probably needs to be.

Stannard’s single narrative poem is so packed with richly constructed, inventive and largely comic detail that to quote extracts really would ruin the pleasure of reading it first-hand, which anyone interested in clever and entertaining poetry should be doing.

What I will add here is an appreciation of the storytelling thread – the ruse of a ‘postcard to Ma’ repetition and the ‘Olympus OM – D E-M10 Mark IV’ camera which are the conduits for observing then reporting all that is experienced and achieved on a holiday beginning at the ‘Hotel Paradiso’ to perpetually explode in its surrounds.

Poetic frolics through ‘crack of dawn’ swims reveal encounters and enactments filtered as well as refracted through lists of relentlessly linked and shifting detail. It is all such a joy to read.

In a world currently determined to self-destruct, our philosophical, psychological, cultural and other templates for determining human existence are preserved in this creative time-capsule for whatever remains after the apocalypse.

Get it at Leafe Press here.