Glass Cassowary

In Verdon's poems, 'trivial things / that stick in the memory' are interrogated for deeper significance, often with unsettling conclusions. Close observations lead to shifting perspectives and surreal departures. Intimations of mortality are recurrent, often refracted through a childlike eye that's unfazed by the strange, dark forces that govern our lives. -Paul MundenRobert Verdon's poetry is from a world where mornings are lathered, Welsh ancestors twist their tea and yokels kill with a purple sweet potato ... In Glass Cassowary there are twists and turns of language to surprise the reader and a few surprises for the maturing poet. Each page is 'a lightning flash hissing close.' -Lizz MurphyRobert Verdon's new volume casts a close and tender gaze on the world in which we live, in which humans and cats and crows share the experience of being alive, and of dying. And of growing old, and how time concertinas itself so that one might be, simultaneously, 7 and 70. It brings back to attention the violence of strikebreakers, the anthems for doomed youth, arpeggios of light, and what it is to be so deeply rooted in this earth. -Jenn Webb