F.U.N.E.X. 01 - Waffles

Posted: 19:37:26 on 21/02/2012
by Nathan

URL | eggboxpublishing.com/articles/show/funex_01__waffles

In Waffles, Matthew Welton presses words on a honeycomb iron and serves them crisp with syrup. Readers of his widely admired Carcanet collections, The Book of Matthew and We needed coffee but..., will recognise one of Britain's most original poets seriously extending his range. Vividly working with light and shade, the intricate patternings of this remarkable sequence repeatedly ask us to imagine what's real: 'A real voice on the phone requests a sum of cash. / Real peaches fill my paper sack. A real drawer slams'.

"A galloping iambic beat, like an over-caffeinated pulse, is maintained throughout Matthew Welton's pamphlet. The poems form interconnecting grids of repetition and parallelism, and cadences ricochet as in an echo chamber: "A yellow swallow hollers in / a hollow yellow willow tree" becomes "A yellow yaffle snaffles up / a pile of apple waffles". Constructivist poems can be as joyless as equations, but Waffles is too playful and too curious about the world for that: "I think that what I'm saying with the words I use / is stuff which, by the sound of things, I might not mean." Welton's highly original approach to form has again produced a set of musical, maddening, irresistible poems."
-- Paul Batchelor, The Guardian

"Welton is the single most enjoyable, exciting poet working in and 
with English today."
-- Simon Turner 

"Poems are rarely so curious, precise and committed to their enquiry"
-- Jack Underwood

Waffles by Matthew Welton is the first of Egg Box's new pamphlet series, F.U.N.E.X., featuring new work from the UK's most exciting and talented poets.

Launch event details to follow soon.

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