Walls to Kick and Hills to Sing from

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.