Adrian Blamires was born in Cornwall and now lives in Reading, working as a teacher. This is his first collection.
"Here is a collection that demands and repays re-reading. Moving and aesthetically rewarding, the poems are informed by a deeply compassionate intelligence and shaped by a thoughtful yet unobtrusive craft. The haunting presence in these poems is the history of human nature – timeless, yet driven and defined by time’s passage; universal, yet inescapably relevant to private individual conscience. In addition to the uncharted watersheds of our private histories, Adrian Blamires draws unostentatiously on a knowledge and love of Greek myth, history, and English literature to make poems of acute contemporary relevance, in a language at once lyrical and demotic. In this lucid and deeply humane first collection, with its incontrovertible ‘clarity of loss’. Blamires offers us poem after poem as individual acts of restitution."
Elizabeth Garret
The Effect of Coastal Processes on the Beach at Amroth
We blew into our hands for warmth,
With calipers and a hypothesis
Measuring the size and roundness
Of pebbles, the effect of coastal processes.
The set of results confounded us.
Maybe there’d been a recent storm:
The size of pebbles did not diminish
In the direction of longshore drift,
Not according to our sample.
There must’ve been a shift
In the prevailing wind. It’s simple,
He explained to his girlfriend, we’re in this
Together – she was eight days late –
But as they sat at the high tide
Mark, watching the swash and backwash,
Waves of attrition, a multitude
Of tiny cuffing knocks, the fact was
That in the fading daylight
Hushed and rocked she’d reached a decision,
Calm, before a sea of troubles.
In my palm’s a small flat stone:
The flints we skim return as pebbles.
Of the beach at Amroth’s population
Would anyone ever miss this one?
"Here is a collection that demands and repays re-reading. Moving and aesthetically rewarding, the poems are informed by a deeply compassionate intelligence and shaped by a thoughtful yet unobtrusive craft. The haunting presence in these poems is the history of human nature – timeless, yet driven and defined by time’s passage; universal, yet inescapably relevant to private individual conscience. In addition to the uncharted watersheds of our private histories, Adrian Blamires draws unostentatiously on a knowledge and love of Greek myth, history, and English literature to make poems of acute contemporary relevance, in a language at once lyrical and demotic. In this lucid and deeply humane first collection, with its incontrovertible ‘clarity of loss’. Blamires offers us poem after poem as individual acts of restitution."
Elizabeth Garret
The Effect of Coastal Processes on the Beach at Amroth
We blew into our hands for warmth,
With calipers and a hypothesis
Measuring the size and roundness
Of pebbles, the effect of coastal processes.
The set of results confounded us.
Maybe there’d been a recent storm:
The size of pebbles did not diminish
In the direction of longshore drift,
Not according to our sample.
There must’ve been a shift
In the prevailing wind. It’s simple,
He explained to his girlfriend, we’re in this
Together – she was eight days late –
But as they sat at the high tide
Mark, watching the swash and backwash,
Waves of attrition, a multitude
Of tiny cuffing knocks, the fact was
That in the fading daylight
Hushed and rocked she’d reached a decision,
Calm, before a sea of troubles.
In my palm’s a small flat stone:
The flints we skim return as pebbles.
Of the beach at Amroth’s population
Would anyone ever miss this one?