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Graham Burchell |
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POETRY REVIEWS |
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Reviews of Vermeer's Corner |
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These poems, like Vermeer's paintings, seek to capture close, intimate moments in the lives of ordinary people. Burchell's language creates flowers without being flowery, and remains consistent to the intellect, expectations and emotional abilities of his subjects without falling into the trap of condescending to his characters. |
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Apart from Katharine Weber and her book, there is another writer interested in Vermeer's paintings. This author is Graham Burchell, poet and children's writer well-known in England. His best tale is Chester and the Green Pig. However, I want to talk you about this author because he was also touched by the enchantment Vermeer reflected on his paintings. Vermeer is the painter of domestic scenes, and what Burchell tries is to play with in these themes, is to comment on the details of the paintings that may have served of inspiration for the painter. More than that, in Burchell's House of Martha and Mary, inspired by Vermeer's painting, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, the characters are aware of themselves as existing within the confines of a painting. Burchell has his characters comment in an ironic way on the situation they are living inside these paintings. |
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Reviews of Ladies of Divided Twins |
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Graham Burchell manages to set a scene of ambitious awareness and craft in his latest collection. His words haunt us with clarity and suggestion. Stark and emotionally rich. This book is a sublime addition to art and its author a notable voice in contemporary poetry. |
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Like Glowworms in July, Graham Burchell's poems flash their brief lightnings and draw us near. In Ladies of Divided Twins, his alternately sad, brilliant, torn, and tantalizing women are presences who strike fire with every glance. L. Ward Abel; Author of Jonesing for Byzantium and Peach Box and Verge. |
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Burchell is unafraid to write his poems using variations of meter and with stanzas ranging from triplets to quintains to free verse to help capture the essence of the woman he is 'expressing'. The styles used are as varied as the women themselves, which both refreshes the text and helps to honour the importance of the message being conveyed. These women, Burchell seems to be saying, are organic creatures and will not be confined within the cage of repetitious four-line stanzas. The poetry should be moulded to who they are, and not the other way around. Elle's Competitive Nature, one of the strongest poems in the collection and perhaps thelongest, is written in a series of broken stanzas that scatter across two pages as we learn of her difficulties that come from having 'breasts and brain' too big for her body. Elle, 'strong willed yet brittle' has a strong fear of commitment, pregnancy, life, death. We emerge from the poem with a strong sense of this woman, aided in no small manner by the way in which it was |
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