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Familiar Territory by Rupert Loydell
ISBN 1904781322, bluechrome P O Box 109, Portishead, North Somerset BS20 7ZJ; , A5 perfect bound 60pp £7.99

"...All this I suppose is familiar territory,/ a country you would like to visit.// There is no chance now of finding unknown places,/ the view from the window is not what you see..." (from "Repeat").

Rupert Loydell’s sources include letters, magazines, reviews, exhibition catalogues and books such as Andrew Duncan’s "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", Jeff Noon’s "Falling out of cars" and "Don’t Ask Me What I Mean" edited by Clare Brown and Don Paterson, all mulled over, cut-up, combined, shaped and pared.

"...It is evening and language casts/ a long shadow across the page:/ straight lines filled with pregnant/ pauses, stanzas waiting for a break;/ world simplified out of existence.// This little stream ran fast and clear,/ words suddened cleansed and dazzled./ No one has the right to easy answers,/ the fun is in diving in and investigating./ I had led an entirely different life..." (from "Stream").

This is Rupert Loydell near his best: the poems are minimal and leave space for the reader. The poem’s concerns seem mundane until a slant of light draws attention to the word order of a phrase or an image, as the poet says,

"...Borders fascinate me, transitions/ between one condition and/ the next: past and future, life/ and death, sanity and nonsense./ Passing through them is to enter..."  (from "Divinity (im Ken Smith)").