The English Sweats
It is a sign of Brookes’ prodigious maturity that his eagerness to explore his attachment to Sussex in The English Sweats produces a wide-ranging and sophisticated meditation on the nature of national and regional belonging.
Marshalling an impressive portfolio of research, the poems traverse a range of historical subject matter,
including Roman Britain, Medieval Sussex and the Second World War.
These settings are evoked via a suprising and authoritative range of voices,
and the collection navigates from critical historical sites to the glimpsed,
sinewy beauty of animals such as eels and minks, with an illuminating sense of
detail and proportion. The subject matter is well suited to Brookes’
obvious delight in the sound and texture of old words, and he realises
this throughout the collection with distinctively muscular rhythms and delicately poised cadences.
The English Sweats is not to be missed.
ISBN 978-1-906309-10-7
£8 plus £4 p&p
IN CLITHEROE KEEP (II)
(extract)
You think always in foreign
English, the uncomforting
syllables lost to the tongue.
Clitheroe re-runs our kid's old news:
who's kept it up, who's moved
away, and on. Time's groove
like the dent left on your side
of the double bed; one line:
Ribble, Mons, Irrawaddy, Rhine.
