Clueless Dogs by Rhian Edwards

I drove thirty miles yesterday evening to attend a reading at Brecon Guildhall. I say reading but in fact it was a recitation for Rhian Edwards was adamant that a poet should be able to recite their work without reference to a printed page. She was reading from her first collection, 'Clueless Dogs', which had won the John Tripp Award 2011-2012 and was Wales Book of the Year 2013. it was an exhilarating performance of barely restrained energy. Rhian is, after all, a performance poet of great vitality. She seemed to be reliving the experiences that had prompted the poetry as she recited, and some of those experiences were clearly far from painless, especially where former lovers were concerned. It was confessional poetry that seemed particularly raw. 'Marital Visit' - a married lover shoos her out of the house in readiness for a visit from his wife, I've selected, what were for me, the particularly poignant verses:

It's her visiting time
which presses the pause,
makes you follow me downstairs
and shepherd me out of the door...

...The ritual begins with the clearing
away of my face: foundation, lipstick,
powder, concealer, the wooden brush
cobwebbed with my unyielding knots...

Your wife lets herself in,
carries herself across the threshold,
she smiles at her hallway,
sniffing me everywhere.

There are two other poems that extend this story of an affair that is inevitably doomed, 'Suitcase' imagines the poet packed in a suitcase and lying on the upper shelf of the wife's wardrobe, and 'Pinchbeck' mocks the man's attempts to return the house to its bachelor status and ends with the stark:

Your bedroom has lost its bottles.
There are no trinkets scattered
around the mirror and no face powder
dusting the wood. Her hanging rail
has been picked to the bones
and wears only the white wall behind it.

A long-distance courtship is evoked with all its frustration in 'Skype'; and 'House Key' reveals the apprehension of a boy who knows how to grab the latchkey on its string but is terrified of entering the empty house.

The collection is full of poetic gems that evoke odd scenes and incidents peripheral to love, both requited and unrequited with a subtle humour and often a sense of joy. 'Pest Controller' is a fine example of a lively woman succumbing to the temptation to flirt in totally improbable circumstances. Intriguing and captivating, 'Clueless Dogs' must surely be only a taste of the brilliance yet to come.