Wild Ways

The poet Brodie bares himself. Poets bare themselves and their poems sit at a certain balance between how much the poet is baring, and how much of it we can enjoy or bear to look at. Brodie shows us the edges of his sanity, his demons and his feelings, and with a healthy disregard for how much of it we want to see. It’s his decision, and we are going to see it all. Brodie writes like fuck! And the verses which result form a narrative in a broken, bedsit kind of way.

The first four pages of Wild ways (Whirlpool Press) are like a winter’s journey; the next six are a relationship. Brodie has a talent for the insane, see Blue Cheese. In the poem A feed we see some plain living guys make soup. The poem A feed is like reading all the poetic lessons that can be taken from Bukowski, and adding another dimension, with something like the noise of the universe rushing in.

The collection laid out beautifully, typeset and gloriously smashed together, with ambiguity about where one poem may end and another one may begin. It gives the collection a wandering feel, like listening to the poet read to himself, with his own mind speaking over himself, as in maybe, the poem Roots, (‘not sure why I thought of war.’)

Wild ways ends with a few of what I can only call spaced-out poems, which are conversational, evocative, thoughts to oneself plus bare confessional, as in maybe the reveries of a country walker.

For Brodie it’s ‘Watering wells V’s buzzing beez’ (smoke that thunders) - one of many phrases that show he’s listening to the cosmos, phrases that show that he is awake, and which display a talent for the word that you love to see as a reader.

This is all very well, but it should be added that while Graham Brodie may be a poet, it is not the poetry that he is best known for. The above meme may help illustrate this.