Reviews

Another Place by David Williams

risky_oak's review

Another Place, the third volume of poetry by David Williams. I don't really like the cliché phrase, "my favourite", but I can make an exception because this collection has some of my favourite poems by David. On the top of the list (maybe) is "The fable in the stable", another poem similar to the “Christmas Bus” from his first collection [b:Genius Loci Poetry|22523697|Genius Loci Poetry|David Williams|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403194727s/22523697.jpg|41971540]; allegorical, playful, and this time with rhymes, and as always with a bittersweet ending. Next we have "Charles Bukowski's Hemorrhoids" or a single Welsh hemorrhoid. If you want to find out buy this book. "I don't go to funerals", and "My House, the Coffin" are two poems I first read on David's blog Shark Fishing in Wales. I'm afraid I saw myself in there, but like it or not, I go to funerals because in Cyprus you HAVE to go to the funeral of a possibly beloved person, and my house is not a Coffin, but sometimes it feels like a coffin. It's very interesting to find poems you can almost entirely relate. "Bad Names" sounds like my own poem in my upcoming collection Κύπρος/Kıbrıs... (STOP advertising yourself!) [beat] ...that starts like this: They teach the Greek boys about the bad Turks, They teach the Turkish boys about the Bad Greeks. . . It's all in our freaking minds, all this difference, this separation, this... hate. Moving on the last poem I'm going to mention here is the "You wear it well". I read this poem again on his blog and I fully understand the discrimination between mental and body illness. People think that if you suffer from mental illness you are a monster, they have to lock you in Arkham Asylum, and in Cyprus we make jokes of them (another nice fact from the Paradise called Cyprus), another bitter poem by David, another collection by Dafydd, Another Place to go to with Δαβίδ. 4.5 stars from me.