...  Jonathan Edwards’ collection takes a very different approach. Where Burton’s poems feel controlled to the point of being sedate, Edwards revels in the quixotic and mercurial. His flagship pieces, Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren in Crumlin for the filming of Arabesque, June 1965, and Evel Knievel Jumps Over my Family demonstrate an infectious delight in all the quirky dreamlike visions that weigh in upon a modern Welsh identity. The latter poem in particular demonstrates Edwards’ full-tilt approach to verse:

Mr Knievel has faced much bigger challenges:
double-deckers, monster trucks, though the giraffe

is urban legend. Evel Knievel enters,
Eye of the Tiger drowned by cheers,
his costume tassels, his costume a slipstream,
his anxious face an act to pump the crowd,

The listing and repetition eke out the hyperbolic tendencies of the poem wonderfully, doubling and redoubling the effects of Edwards’ infectious élan; as in so many of his best poems, we are drawn forward through the interplay of the ridiculous and the heart-achingly serious. Indeed, Edwards might best be described as a surrealist in the true sense of the word, his verse a steady-handed scraping away at the surfaces of contemporary reality to reveal emotional truths.

Edwards’ versions of that contemporary reality are tightly focused around his portrayals of the South Wales valleys. Unlike Burton’s Hallaton, however, he aims less for a landscape painting than he does for a more human geography, exploring the idioms and idiosyncrasies of his family and his ties to Ebbw Vale. So much so that his collection often feels like a portrait gallery squeezed inside a cramped terrace house: it’s bursting at the seams with the sort of vignettes that characterised the earlier work of northern poets like Simon Armitage and Andrew Waterhouse a decade and more ago. Edwards’ poem Building my Grandfather, for example, bears remarkable affinities to Waterhouse’s Climbing my Grandfather. Consider these two extracts from the former and the latter respectively:

He comes flat-pack, a gift for my eighteenth.
We tip the bits out on the living room carpet:
nuts and bolts, a spanner, an Allen key,
tubes halfway between telescopes and weapons.
At first he goes together easily:
slippered left foot clicks into the ankle,
shin joins at a perfect right angle.
(Jonathan Edwards, Building my Grandfather)

I decide to do it free, without a rope or a net.
First, the old brogues, dusty and cracked;
an easy scramble onto his trousers,
pushing into the weave, trying to get a grip.
By the overhanging shirt I change
direction, traverse along his belt
to an earth stained hand.
(Andrew Waterhouse, Climbing my Grandfather; from In, Rialto, 2000)

There’s a kind of genetic closeness here that raises significant questions about the foundations of Edwards’ verse – not just in the similarity of subject but in their similarity of approach, tone and style. There’s the loosely disarming end-stopped opening line that also frames the conceit; the quick segue into a list that forms an affirmation of a specific set of homely details; the phrasing that slots the whole thing into a sort of earnest free verse; and so on. It’s a list that I’ve seen repeated elsewhere (not least in my own writing) but the comparison with Waterhouse demands the question: have first collections really stagnated that much in fifteen years? Edwards’ work is far from stagnant – it’s lively, engaging, and often witty – but it leaves me with a lingering impression that this collection is often meeting the expectations of a specific  side of contemporary poetry culture rather than breaking into new territories. As with any collection that seeks a kind of celebration of the ordinary, there’s a risk that too much is being taken as read, and that potential difficulties are not so much swept aside as rendered invisible by limitations of perspective.

If this seems somewhat unfair to Edwards’ obvious gifts as a poet – well, it is. Out of the three poets reviewed here, I ended up feeling that his collection had both the most to offer the casual reader and the least to offer those who might express reservations about all that is nearest to the surface in contemporary poetry. Edwards has produced verse of compelling charm and grace here, and his lively portraiture of valleys people past and present will ring true with many readers. But perhaps the comparison with Andrew Waterhouse cuts into Edwards’ collection in other ways: Waterhouse’s poetry interspersed the heartwarming with the chilling, the tragic, and the outright strange in ways that went beyond the merely quirky or charming. Edwards’ work perhaps surpasses Waterhouse in its formal sharpness and technical acuity but, in this first book at least, he hasn’t yet found Waterhouse’s reach.