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"Etymology" by Bryan Walpert
Cinnamon Press £7.99

As the title indicates, Walpert’s thematic intention is to explore the roots of language, definitions and meanings, which he does. Etymology can be fascinating – I welcome every opportunity to expand my understanding of a word; however the key to exploring the etymology within poetry is surely (as Pound would state) to make it new. In ‘Ugly’, Walpert cleverly juxtaposes his etymological intentions with an exploration of a relationship and the upbringing of the couple within that relationship, which in and of itself represents attention to craft. However, my patience was somewhat exhausted by no less than four definitions of the word ‘ugly’ and its respective connectives. However in the closing lines,Walpert demonstrates the potential power of his rhetoric – when he allows the abstract to collide with the physical, the effect is exhilarating:

the former
with a taste like truth, the latter
sweet as ignorance, sticky like childhood.

Certainly the stronger poems in this collection were those that contained nothing more than a nod towards the meaning of a word rather than its roots; in ‘Late’, he offers an intimate, sensual and fiercely considered snapshot of the first love of a late bloomer, but even in this exceptional poem I found an issue of breath in his composition:

I left my first job each night with a film
of cooking grease on my skin, my hair, soaked
into the brown corduroys and the dancing carrots
and cauliflowers printed on the shirt

they made us wear in July,

Throughout the collection there is a tendency for long lines. However, if you follow the punctuation on the page, his use of enjambment means that some lines are difficult to read aloud. The other issue that occasionally threw me out of his poems were the line breaks; maybe Walpert is of the opinion that each line needn’t hold itself as an individual unit of sense, and that weak line endings are a matter of choice; but frankly it distracted me unnecessarily, especially in the opening poem ‘No Metaphor’:

the weight on his back less like

a broken-hearted lament than a bulky
instrument. This sight, it’s true, might
remind someone less sensible than you
of a duet, of a girl, of the year

Aside from ‘broken-hearted’, there are too many lines which don’t hold as units of sense in the poem. I could perhaps overlook this if this only occurred once or twice, but there are just too many poems where this occurs in the collection.

In conclusion, there are aspects of this collection that I really enjoyed, his imagery is often incredibly strong, and his invocation of the senses, is at times, faultless. Sadly, I was left with the feeling that the overriding theme of the collection, all too often, overrode his strengths.