Robustly colourful collection

Reviewed by Dushy Parakrama

This robustly colourful collection of poems, skilfully put together by young Jeron Daniel, a protagonist in contemporary poetry practice, is a ready vade mecum which identifies trends and drives the direction of contemporary verse.

A distinguished collection, it is somewhat masculine, but with an individual poetic perspective and an air of internationalism. The poet remains open-minded and passionate, a rare combination - and this is what makes it an indispensable read.

Jeron Daniel belongs to that breed of poets who have a flair for blending the intellectual and the sensual. Many of the poems enable a kind of telepathy between reader and the poet. Instead of analysis, the poems encourage emotional involvement.

There are lots of fingers on pulses of topicality, with an appetite for the collision rather than collusion. The poems sometimes feel vertiginous, at other times heady, and we experience the illusion of falling though cracks - in reason, in consciousness, in time. They sometimes portray disconcerting alterations in perception that can be produced by little hiccups in the confident patterns of mundane experiences. The constant rhythm of the flowing and ebbing lines outline man's strengths and weakness, breaking wave-like to intermingle with haunting images.

Sketches - Jeron Daniel's first collection - confirms him to be a time-traveller in a shape-shifting mental universe. His intensely focused, sensuously inflected poems are both entranced and entrancing - a poet for whom thoughts are sensations and sensations are thoughts.

As an editor (and certainly an attentive one!) I was delighted to find that many of Jeron Daniel's poems offer peculiarly sweet rewards to the reader.

They often act as the sonar devices of contemporary consciousness, restlessly scanning the sounds and breath, speech and rhythms of life - as the poet reaches out to make it a better world.