The Masses

In The Masses the creepy-crawlies visibly teem. Adapting the sound-mutating technique Goodland perfected in Gloss, where well-known phrases are minutely changed to sly and comic effect, here the creatures which are usually only glimpsed, only imagined with a flinch, are foregrounded in phonic mutation. Amid the rich density of these playful and sometimes frightening poems are cut-back lyrics, often about fatherhood in a diminished world, and these give the book overall a sense not just of the strangeness of the fauna around us but of the strangeness of our own language nests, of the fragility of the world an older generation has ruined and is now bequeathing to the young. -Richard Price Goodland's exploration of the world of small creatures is both playful and intellectually challenging. Shaped from biological data and direct observation, this catalogue of voices invites a subtle reversal of perspective. The book acknowledges the threat of a multitudinous unknown and also celebrates the evolution of skills that may not coincide with human design. These encounters with the strange, or inhabiting of it, form a word-feast (`mess') in which origins and divarication are crucial. Readers will appreciate the work's linguistic texture and its cultural resonance. -Gavin Selerie An insect is an insect is an insect. Or perhaps not: there is nothing so certain or pat in Giles Goodland's poems of insect life; and he resists the temptations of literary abstraction as much as he refuses to stop at mere quotidian observation. Instead, he brings to bear rich reserves of insight, invention, humour and linguistic mastery in order to provoke insight in the reader... as well as astonishment and delight. -David Miller See more