Paul Brookes
Paul Brookes
In ‘These Random Acts of Wildness’, Brookes’ deeply thoughtful poetry tasks the containing form of the sonnet with making sense of the animal mess of living—and of dying. This distinctive and reflective collection holds multiple lives: human, animal, even sentient object, each looking for its way to reconcile what cannot be tamed with our need to impose order enough to understand it, and to make our peace. Brookes examines every stone he turns with clear eyes, layered language and deft allegory. There is a strange intimacy at the core of this collection: domestic and wild meditations, the poet’s ability to take up the mantle of hedgehog or hoover with convincing embodiment, allow a delicately prosaic, personal making-sense of difficult human subjects—the split home, bullying, awkwardness, loneliness, and grief.
Brookes’ skill with this form is simply remarkable, and its constraints seem a basket self-weaving as we watch. The cadence treads perfect sync with his contemplative storytelling, to cradle, not cage it, with respect for the poet’s own craft. And these are indeed stories, ongoing: even in the closing cemetery, haunted by the artfully drawn lives of local soldiers, cricketers, labourers, and fiddlers, even with ‘so much promise / gone, now curtains are drawn beside the pits’, what we’ve learned from their immortaliser is that, messy or not, ‘Belief is true’ and so we must believe ‘The wild dance of the swifts amongst the dead / reminds us life goes on restless to be fed’.
Brookes’ skill with this form is simply remarkable, and its constraints seem a basket self-weaving as we watch. The cadence treads perfect sync with his contemplative storytelling, to cradle, not cage it, with respect for the poet’s own craft. And these are indeed stories, ongoing: even in the closing cemetery, haunted by the artfully drawn lives of local soldiers, cricketers, labourers, and fiddlers, even with ‘so much promise / gone, now curtains are drawn beside the pits’, what we’ve learned from their immortaliser is that, messy or not, ‘Belief is true’ and so we must believe ‘The wild dance of the swifts amongst the dead / reminds us life goes on restless to be fed’.
