Lynley Edmeades Knihy

In this luscious collaboration poet Lynley Edmeades and painter Saskia Leek explore ideas of the quotidian and its everyday miracles. Their close, intense domestic observations merge with the philosophical, in a quest for deeper meaning. Leek’s high-colour palette and symbolic investigation of the domestic provide Edmeades with a starting point, to which she writes back with a chromatic and vivid pen. In repetitive and evolving processes, artist and poet speak to each other through a prismatic renewal of familiar objects and images—fruit bowls, ceramic cups, sleeping babies, the view from a window—holding them up to the light and presenting them anew. This fourth book in the korero series of ‘picture books for grown-ups,’ edited by Lloyd Jones, is as surprising, engaging, and delightful and its predecessors.

In this original second collection, Lynley Edmeades turns her attention to ideas of sound, listening, and speech. Listening In is full of the verbal play and linguistic experimentation that characterised her first collection, but it also shows the poet pushing the form into new territories. Her poems show, often sardonically, how language can be undermined: linguistic registers are rife with uncertainties, ambiguities, and accidental comedy. She shuffles and reshuffles statements and texts, and assumes multiple perspectives with the skill of a ventriloquist. These poems probe political rhetoric and linguistic slippages with a sceptical eye, and highlight the role of listening--or the errors of listening--in everyday communication.

"As the Verb Tenses is the work of a reflective and sensitive poetic talent: one run with gleaming wires of joy. In poems that gather together the vivid details of childhood memory, the surreal juxtapositions of life in the contemporary West, the wry observations of a temporary expatriate, the deeply lodged pain of historical and personal loss, Lynley Edmeades speaks to us in delicately spun lines that press out ironies, dissonances and profound formative experience. From playful, rhythmical poems about the art of dinner conversation, to warm glimpses of intimacy, she lays poetry's table with the knife of light satire, the bright salt of wit, the heady wine of love, the bread of knowledge. This quietly poised, confident first collection has a musical, emotional and thematic range of a substantial new talent"--Back cover.