Customer Reviews

Pilots and Navigators (Oxford Poets)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This first collection is disarming because it does not particularly mean to be. It never affects stylistic pretensions, cutesy avant-garde tricks, or the hip irony of many young intellectuals' of our generation's first works. He's an actor and writes about his experiences with grace and honesty that belie the fact that this is a first volume - they seem to come out of someone wiser than his 27 years! He writes using traditional forms, using their constraints in liberating ways, writing with depth about the 'speeding apart of things'... Antony Dunn is extremely talented but no dilettante - this fellow polymath gives his work a hearty recommendation!

I admit firstly that he's my brother, and OK I get a few name checks along the way in this book, but that aside there still remains the unflinching fact that this is powerful transcendent stuff.

As we grew up I mocked him unmercilessly for his arty nature, poetry being the quickest way for any kid to make a laughing stock of himself, but he's the first to admit that his early stuff was pants.

I hate most poetry - I find most of it trite, self-regarding, obvious or just plain camp. But the interest here is in the way images are taken and are given meaning way beyond what they would be in the hands of an ordinary poet. I have as much difficulty as the OUP cover writers obviously did in trying to sum up this fine art, but I can say simply that this collection is filled with a youth and wonder that is fiery and all-embracing in its zest and passion, but with an assured competence and a control and a sensitivity to put every word in its place and to never use two words where one will do.

I think you should buy it, and I think you should keep an eye out for the next one too

This will make you laugh, cry, and your spine tingle!! Isn't that what poetry is supposed to do? Isn't that what ALL art should do? "Judith With the Head of Holofernes" is worth the price of this slim but power-packed volume. Read that poem and you'll know why this young poet won the Newdigate Prize, the same prize Oscar Wilde won for his talents.