Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

B.B. (Billy) Holmes published this 68-page volume at the age of seventeen. The writing shows a young poet searching in the everyday for mythology, for narrative in the forgotten landscapes of the western Midlands, and for metaphor for the processes of the art he practises. A series of 84 sometimes-linked poems, the work lacks technique – the rhyming couplet with extendable lines and iambic meter being the norm. But this is a poet at the outset of his career. The verse is distinguished by its force and energy.

Like chisel to stone and clay to pot
the author has an idea, a plot.
The words weave colours unknown to man
of the words painted by an oilpainter artisan.

This is surely Holmes@future, to be a creator of ‘colours unknown’. Ordered Chaos is a brave first venture.