Friday Poem – ‘Rhys’ by Rhian Edwards

~ Seren Books

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Rhys’ by Rhian Edwards from her collection Clueless Dogs.

This cover shows a cartoon collage of a Dalmatian. The text reads Clueless Dogs Rhian Edwards.

Clueless Dogs is the multi-award-winning debut collection by Rhian Edwards. Full of verve and humour, Rhian Edwards’ language has a winning honesty and intensity. Poems like ‘The Welshman Who Couldn’t Sing’ chronicle a fraught childhood in Bridgend, south Wales, where the sensitive child escapes through imaginative games of ‘Playing Dead’ and ‘Broken Lifeboat’. Later poems explore teenage lusts, student rivalries, damaged peers and tense situations. Although the author doesn’t flinch from ruthless depictions, in which we are often implicated by her use of the second person ‘You’, there is an underlying sweetness, an elegiac thread to this remarkable collection.

Rhys Like the time you invited me inside the ottoman on the landing and sat on the lid laughing while I scratched and screamed at the wood. Or when the babysitter wasn’t looking, you taught me the quickest way to add nine, showed me to tie my laces with the tale of two rabbits disappearing down a hole. Like the day you caught the slow-worm that tried to whip away the sun, letting it loose into the folds of the blanket that I held like a lover. Not to mention the crimes I invented for which I never knew you were beaten, or that summer you took away the stabilisers to be the sole witness to me riding away. Like the times I spied in your bedroom, played your records and fanned open your books, only to slip between the sheets with a nakedness meant only for bath time.

Clueless Dogs is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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