WALKING ON BONES

It’s tempting to assume that any poet who resorts to prose poems is lazy, inept, terribly trendy—or all three. But this collection offers no evidence that Welsh poet Gwyn has taken any shortcuts. His work’s form seems instead to have arisen intrinsically out of the ideas and materials that presented themselves. Gwyn studied anthropology and later spent a decade traveling through the countries surrounding the Mediterranean, particularly Crete and Catalonia. While these influences can be discerned, each prose poem inhabits its own world, which Gwyn imbues with such quirky observations as, “The soul travels at the speed of a trotting camel.” He lends each situation an air of mystery and offers layer upon layer of speculation, in a kind of reverse archaeology, as to what has occurred and what will happen next. People become interchangeable because they are archetypes, and he describes equally archetypal ordinary tasks: cleaning fish, shaving, mowing the lawn, ironing, chopping wood. Gwyn truly shines in the sensuous details he imparts to each simple act: the vividness of “Peeling an Orange” actually induces a sensation of tingling on the tongue.

While the poet laments “the pernicious attributes of a godless world,” his work goes a long way toward sanctifying the rituals of daily life.