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Walls to Kick and Hills to Sing From: A Comedy with Interruptions is a new poetry collection from Murray Edmond. Arranged in six acts, ‘Exposition’, ‘Complication’, ‘Revelation’, ‘Peripety’, ‘Catastrophe’ and ‘Denouement’, it merrily experiments with voice and performance, including, in various forms, monologues, dialogues, choruses, songs, scene sets and storyboards.

Edmond writes that ‘there isn’t a poem which couldn’t have been otherwise / than it is’, and in his poems form is aptly married to content. Language plays a starring role – ‘lobal glooming’, ‘mobile grooming’, ‘focal warping’, ‘glottal warbling’ runs a poem on global warming. A consummate director, he arranges his dramatic and mock dramatic pieces with swagger and panache, but never without a glint of self-irony. The collection’s surprises and surreal moments (a seal reciting R. A. K. Mason, a goat tied to the theatre door) are balanced with more serious lyric poems, of which the final section and superb, postcard-like ‘Narrow Roads to the East’ sequence are highlights.

This diverse miscellany, which nevertheless has the coherence of a well-structured variety show, is a fine book – challenging, ‘alerting’, playful, profound. These poems take readers into complex sites where language and experience meet.

Author

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Reviews

From exposition to denouement it’s a loose concoction, a medley of verse that begins with a wonderful opening sequence. The tone is a collation of ironic, absurd and existential humour that begins with the gentle mockery of poetry itself. – Peter Dornauf, Waikato Times 

. . . an author writing at the peak of his powers  . . . this is really a very technically accomplished book – which in its slim appearance nevertheless covers a huge range of emotion and a huge range of techniques. – David Hill, Speaking Volumes

The collection is a masterful execution of form which breathes new life into formal poetry and, at the same time, such a complete subversion of form that it proves such structures obsolete. – Emma Bolden, Jacket