Godfrey Rust
Breaking the Chains
Poems & Performance Pieces
Some books are an absolute treat
and this is one of them. It is a collection of poems – some published for the
first time, others gathered from The Place Where Socks Go and various
magazines and anthologies. Presented without illustrations on parchment style
paper, medium and content reflect first class quality.
Rust’s
poetry is intelligent but expressed in an accessible language, describing the
familiar in an original way. Scenarios include the stables of the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse; a Christmas dinner party gatecrashed by King Herod; and, for
a change, Joseph’s perspective on Jesus’ birth. The pieces vary in length
from a few lines to a much longer work, ‘The Sailing of the Ark’, a sequence
of 45 poems. Written over four years, it charts Rust’s spiritual journey away
from the security of evangelical fundamentalism. His poetry reveals a spiritual
wrestling that confronts and comforts.
Quite often,
the final line provides an unexpected twist or a challenging question.
‘Drunkard’ describes what seems to be an alcoholic craving “the thin white
warm hard stuff/that lays you out flat”, but turns out instead to be an infant
demanding a feed.
Rust has
used many of his poems in live performance. Breaking the Chains could be used
for this purpose, or for an enthralling read to tease out the deeper meanings at
leisure.
Susan
Bancroft
March
1993