Complete Travels

Poetry. In Martin Corless-Smith's poems there are many voices, heard and misheard in fragments fused in startling array. They are dialect poems, but the dialect undergoes constant shift, a wealth of vernacular only loosely bound to time and place: grammar twists and bends as echoes are sounded of an older written language, lively ghosts of speech. Corless-Smith embraces the themes and devices of the pastoral, with and without irony, to create the rituals of Worcestershire Mass and the intermittent masque of The Garden. These poems seem always to demand performance, but it is a performance they also, for the sheer pleasure of unruliness, resist.