Evans the Death, the undertaker, laughs high and aloud in his sleep and curls up his toes as he sees, upon waking fifty years ago, snow lie deep on the goosefield behind the sleeping house; and he runs out into the fields where his mother is making Welshcakes in the snow, and steals a fistful of snowflakes and currants and climbs back to bed to eat them cold and sweet under the warm, white clothes while his mother dances in the snow kitchen crying out for her lost currants.
Paul Brookes takes the reader on a nature journey opening with Wolf Eye going through a rotten gate and up flagstones. The narrator splish-slashes paving slabs sending concrete waves and ripples. Inventive metaphor is explored. ‘Trees become lampstands ready for the moonlight bulb.’ ‘Grass is mute. River is dumb.’ Brilliant imagery is formed with light, bones and colour. Moods are created with a mop bucket. The sky becomes a skull with the moon as one eye, and the sun as the other. Wolf Eye is a nature collection that won’t disappoint. One that poetry lovers can dip in and out of anytime.
Patricia M Osborne Poet, Short Story Writer, and Novelist.
If you wish to buy a copy of Paul’s new collection here’s the link: https://www.theredceilingspress.co.uk/product-page/wolf-eye-paul-brookes
Wolf Eye Review, by Alex Oliver
I seldom succumb to superlatives, nor any other short-cut. I am, however, as a lesser or common word wrestler, moved to try to find the right ones… The Wolf Eye is the moon, Paul Brookes tells me; a lens through which he regards his native Wombwell. You could knock on doors anywhere and eventually meet a poet. But there is something about this region, this Brigante borderland, that draws out the terse, livid descriptor in any scrivener. It can make for obscure or dense text, and Wolf Eye is no exception, which the author accepts. Being somewhat surreal if not cryptic myself – has perhaps been a barrier against a fair and rational review, but that said, we can only hold up our own mirror to this intense, if evasive light. Inasmuch as readers know me not, I am a motorcyclist who likes to make his own journeys, therefore I identify with the wolf as loner – a position Brookes had found himself in – but enjoys rather than endures.
Wolf Eye the first in this collection is almost a walk with a wolf – the soul of the author, watching his native world, perhaps evading engagement with all but the landscape. Imagery, description – the scene is set in an experienced hand. Perhaps so familiar with it, a kind of shorthand creeps in – to this place where clouds are made of wood. Further into the collection, there is a sense of broken town community, robbed of its raison d’etre, and nature sneaks in where neglect takes hold.
A bleak almost Peake-like bone-searching proceeds through a black pantomime of resurrection, percussion and lightning. It shuffles rather than acts through a reality of dreams, in the torture of post-strike food parcels that are unable to salve the real (government-imposed) hurt. If I may quote Don Dokken “…still these broken bones within my soul remain…”. How else might poetry emerge from an inescapable poverty trap?
The mood changes to Zen with “My Mop Bucket”. Cleaning floors with calligraphic flourishes, the same floors again and again – yet every stroke of the mop different. And each clean of the same space is different. The art of mop is more important than cleaning. Yet in this heady place, reality and simile are perhaps choice if not clear.
One eye the sun, another the moon – is it Escher’s plan for how a drawing is going to be? The power of alliteration and repetition harness a spell, wide-eyed, bright-eyed push and pull of distant planets – that draw us into a Dali-scape of the universe under a giant boot. Connected with all this, the trees are calendars out-reaching our lives. Yet they too are but glimpses of the tireless universe. Even so, the natural world cannot explain it’s mysteries and all is paradox. There are likely as not issues I’ve not touched, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone, Paul Brookes included. Just as his water mirrors the scenes he sets, so too readership will mirror back his words, changed. Having known a world where you’re cold and cannot get warm, despite others being warm – that irony turns up the heat of the cold burn – of the experiential writer.
His last work in this collection, casts feathers, water, and the hymns of sheep in a ragged paper reflection of what has gone before. It is the place I began this review, full of word-hungry minds, who ride the same buses, drink the same beer, duffled up against the elements, yet naked in a landscape that is prehistoric and present in the same tense. Thusly, there is no clever knot to tie this off with; the question burns bright as any answer we find, so we look and look again.
Alex Oliver
If you wish to buy a copy of Paul’s new collection here’s the link: https://www.theredceilingspress.co.uk/product-page/wolf-eye-paul-brookes
YouTube video of Paul reading the whole of Wolf Eye: https://youtu.be/BjrFn_zoa_M?si=ijmSAXm3p9V4u_pK
Wolf Eye is a Wolf Moon. Is about the place where I have lived and worked for over twenty years. A little town called Wombwell, in the district of Barnsley in South Yorkshire. Born in North Yorkshire the move South as a child was a culture shock. As a ten year old I loved the idea of wolves and eagles and dragons. Ways of seeing. An incomer, an outsider navigating dialect and class. There is an outsider in all of us. A wolf, eagle, dragon in us all. It is good to look at things differently. Wombwell is an ex mining town, reimagined by politicians into industrial estates, uprooted communities, changing shop fronts, “change of use.” It has always had big skies and cloudscapes. It is not William Blake’s London or Dylan Thomas’ Llareggub. These were the lenses I was gifted as a child to see through. These are not stories, narrative tales. They are images. The mop and bucket is the one I use to clean floors in the shop I work in. In these days of cameras everywhere even the stars and planets become surveillance cameras.
https://www.theredceilingspress.co.uk/product-page/wolf-eye-paul-brookes
The Wombwell Rainbow 