Carcanet (2011)
PP. 64
RRP £9.95
Sound Houses
Common experience – of growing up, growing older, losing a parent, being in love, enjoying the natural world in all its nearness and remoteness – provides the raw material for this first collection. Wherever they are set, in the Australian bush or in a West Country sickroom, the poems in Sound Houses keep faith with the often surprising consolations that come from close observation and stillness. Well-loved authors and books appear suddenly; hair-raising anecdotes and football matches become occasions for elegiac comedy; music and domestic ritual raise ghosts.
Both formal and informal, funny and sad, these lyrical poems seek out a strangeness in the everyday: in the transformational territory of childhood and the equally uncertain adult world of grief and loss.
http://newpoetries.blogspot.com/2011/09/john-redmond-on-will-eavess-three-flies.html
“Poetry is a pleaching of language into its most original, convincing and economic shape. Will Eaves has such technical magic at every moment in this collection. Whether semi-concealed narrative, allegorical landscape or literary annotation, each poem in Sound Houses is a pleasure and a satisfaction to encounter.”
– Peter Porter