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Sound Archive
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE (BEST FIRST COLLECTION) 2011
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MICHAEL MURPHY PRIZE 2011
WINNER OF THE DLR STRONG AWARD (IN PARTNERSHIP WITH SHINE) AT POETRY NOW / MOUNTAINS TO SEA
"Sound Archive is an innovative volume..." -- Irish Times 2011
"...a certain other-worldiness combines well with a vigorous realism to tease the reader into putting two and more than that together to perceive something rare and beautiful." -- Poetry Review
"Williams has a talent for assembling compellingly strange and haunting linguistic collages, making Sound Archive an enjoyable debut" -- Poetry London
"...fresh and original." - Planet
Sound Archive is the strikingly original first collection of poems from Nerys Williams. Using formal strategies similar to modernist painting: abstraction, dislocation, surrealist juxtaposition, the poet conjures a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning. There is a playful lightness of touch and tone and for every serious inquisition like ‘An Anatomy of Arguments’ or ‘Conversations with Cocteau’, there is a poem that will muse on ‘Canter’s Starstruck Diner, L.A.’ or on the ‘artifacts’ left by Marilyn Monroe, in ‘Marilyn’s Auction House’. Williams confronts our preconceptions about what it might mean to be a woman writing against the background of two formidable traditions: that of Welsh-speaking Wales and of English literature. A thoughtful, subtle and fascinating first collection.
I've long admired the poetry of Nerys Williams, which is both playful and sharply perceptive, drawing on a wide range of often unexpected influences. She was one of the first people I contacted to contribute poems to my first issue as editor because I think she brings a unique set of interests to bear not just on poetry in Wales, but on poetry generally.
– Zoe Skoulding, Editor of Poetry Wales
"Here's a fine writer who is completely unique in Wales. Nerys Williams would make a tremendous addition to the Seren poetry list".
– Robert Minhinnick
Listen to Nerys Williams read her poem, ‘Kinetic Meoldies’:
Comments
Review from the Irish Times
Welsh born Nerys Williams's Sound Archive is an aptly titles debut collection. The reader can hear an array of voices, from historical figures to family members, throughout the 33 poems. We encounter interesting narratives, biographies and stories, like that of a dead shopkeeper whose ledger carries the story of an unseen life:
Here is biography in a wooden chest
move it to a lit place for words.
However, through a commanding first-person narration the most powerful element of these poems is their playful representation of sensory experience, The poet seems to contemplate the idea of archiving memory, and question whether words are the best, or only, means of recovering what is lost. The Dancing House, for example, evokes movement and says, "I came here to slow dance with history", finding memory within the spiritual dynamism of a historical building. The relationship between language, meaning and truth occupies many of these works Pictorial, cinematic or kinetic representations find their way into poetic expression, stretching the work towards both philosophy and performance. Williams challenges her reader to be open to her work both intellectually and emotionally. She says 'my words are ribbons in a box, / mismatched buttons in a bag' or, elsewhere, 'I am description refusing to unscroll'.
Sound Archive is an innovative volume that invites the reader to go on a journey of discovery. Those who are willing will be rewarded with an opulently intertextual and simultaneously sensual experience.
Irish Times 2011
Review from Poetry Review
Most of her poems in Sound Archive are made up of brief unrelated aphorisms and observations, which she streams together to make some kind of sense, perhaps; certainly their confluence makes music. In 'The Dancing House', dedicated to Josef Capek:
He tells me of sounds wave terrorists at sea
breaking the whale's song
distressing the dolphins
changing their acapella of frenzy
Which is combined, later in the poem, with "there will always be spring / there will always be a curator' and, still further on, "Beware of telling the tide to sing / since whoever lies is not believed / even when speaking the truth." Altogether, it is quite a lovely evocation of the house of the Czech artist and writer, and Williams's reaction to it. She also writes, "I am not a sociable person - I do not think so. / I am not a brave person - I do not think so." This "I" may not be Williams - but in her acknowledgments, thanking Poetry Ireland for a prize, she writes "The recognition encouraged a shy poet." It's hard to tell whether time spent in Berkeley, California influenced the feyness in her writing or she has been blessed by the Welsh or Irish fairies, but a certain other-worldliness combines well with a vigorous realism to tease the reader into putting two and more than that together to perceive something rare and beautiful. Read 'Shopkeeper's Ledger'; 'The Pedagogical Poet'. ...By all means encourage her.
Leah Fritz, Poetry Review Volume 101:4 Winter 2011
Review from Poetry London
Nerys Williams's Sound Archive offers a tapestry of vivid, arresting fragments, speech acts stitched together into not-quite-complete wholes.
Peppered with nifty declarations - 'I came here to slow dance with history' - and intriguing non sequiturs ('Or, the story of oceans as our nostalgia'), the poems hop briskly from one thought or image to the next, switching discursive modes with equal rapidity.
Williams has a talent for assembling compellingly strange and haunting linguistic collages, making Sound Archive an enjoyable debut.
Jane Yeh - Poetry London Spring 2012 No.71