Reviews
Surfacing
“The supercharged, over-communicative modern world in the form of spam and YouTube crackles and buzzes in several of these poems ... I especially like those passages where the sardonic and the poignant are almost impossible to separate or tell apart … Geographically, linguistically, thematically and stylistically this is a varied and rich collection of poems; Attwooll has a keen eye and a sharp tongue but ultimately ... a sympathetic mind.”
Simon Armitage
“I like David Attwooll’s lack of pretension and preciousness. He is playful and experimental…”
Emma Lee, Stephen Payne, Hilary Menos, Sphinx
… at his most insightful he marries this awe at our connectedness to the passage of the years…”
“The excitement of reading David Attwooll’s poems lies in the poet’s intense relationship to language and the verbal and textual musicianship with which he treats his subject matter. From the Goths, Transylvanians and teenage samurai, escaped from the pages of books, to email spam or jazz, to memories about childhood and place, these poems capture Attwooll’s delight in the world around him.”
Jenny Lewis
The Sound Ladder
“David Attwooll’s great new collection…”
“... humane and thoughtful with so much to enjoy.”
.”.. poems roam from the exotic colours of Mexico to the mudflat floodwater plains of Port Meadow, Oxford ... there’s the sardonically political ... through the playfully absurd ... to the sharply analytical or beautifully observed places where myth elides with reality ... a cluster of clevernesses - some brilliant ideas, some very unusual sideways approaches to getting a decent poem ... Attwooll’s wide ranging glances at offbeat complexities.”
Noel Williams, The North
“[Attwooll] balances seriousness and humour within originality of form in ways that are wholly new and are ... permanent additions to the repertoire of English poetry.”
Laurie Smith
Ground Work
“... lovingly crafted, precisely executed poetry that’s not afraid of a bit of structural experimentation combined with rich visual artwork…What more could you want from a collection? Fantastic.”
Hayden Westfield-Bell, Sabotage Reviews
“... far more than a love affair with a place”
“... gorgeously produced collaboration between a poet and a painter… debunks nature poetry while at the same time creating some of the most exquisite nature poetry I’ve ever come across.”
Claire Trévien’s ‘10 Poetry Highlights of 2014’
Otmoor
“...it’s atmospheric, full of contrasting stories and black line drawings which complement each other richly... On three occasions though, for me, something even more magical happens. These are the only times in the sequence when an untitled set of just three lines of poetry sits quietly facing a line drawing. I surprise myself by just how powerful I find these... The whole pamphlet is evocative and rich; the poet and artist work well together… the collaboration completely fuses, as though the two mediums meet on their most equal terms...”
“Otmoor traces a history of engagement with and within a particular place, combining art and poetry to make a patchwork of intersecting fields. Echoing the Oxfordshire floodplains of its title, this pamphlet tests out a fluid, protean aesthetic within forms of enclosure. These forms range from medieval lyric to sestina to haiku in David Attwooll’s poems, and from aerial photography to geological stratigraphy in Andrew Walton’s line drawings. The combination of these forms allows them to be re-read in conversation with each other, creating conditions for new ways of seeing and being in a place.”
Cyclops
