Simon Rees The Wood below Coelbren November 2014. 91 pp. ISBN-13 978-3-901993-48-0 £10.50 (+ 2.00 p&p), €13.00 (+ 2.50 p&p), US$ 18.00 (+ 3.00 p&p)   "Coelbren is one of those words that has many meanings: it is the name of a place, but it can also mean alot cast to decide fate. It can even mean a supposed alphabet of the ancient Welsh druids. In a country whoseroots go back long before the Romans, things are never simple, and Wales needs poets who are alive to thosemultiple historical layers as much as to the glancing ephemera of the present. Simon Rees is such a poet,and his thought-provoking work, with its keen visual sense, its stylistic versatility and its fine attentionto the significance of the particular, will give readers new ways of seeing this ancient land." Grahame Davies "In Simon Rees' new book the woods below Coelbren extend for miles beyond the township. They do so with accomplishedstyle. These are poems that make history rattle. Sextus Julius Frontinus, the Roman second Governor of Britain, the manwho subdued the Welsh Silures, dreams of water. The Ravenna Cosmographer, the recorder of Rome's roads from India toIreland steps in from the mists. The three heads of hellhound Cerberus are seen on Cardiff's Schooner Way. The craftsmenof the middle ages build again. There are beasts and ghosts and whole gazetteer of places out there on the borders of theknown world. But the centre is still that Coelbren woodland. This is a place where the distant and recent past mix, whereour history is remembered and then forgotten, where the world is both known and unknowable. A remarkable collection." Peter Finch

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Table of Contents

Excerpts from The Wood below Coelbren

The Wood below Coelbren II

The wood below Coelbren,
Laid by Roman soldiers,
Underpins the lost walls
Of the old encampment.

This high, square, dry fortress
Rides above the marshes
On a raft of timber
Cast up on the wet land.

Oaks they felled, barked, squared, laid,
Still lie, now waterlogged
Against the air, sealed down
Under black bog-juices.

Marshalled like dead soldiers
Buried where they'd fallen,
They still defend the fort
Where the sheep crop and graze.

No Silurians now
Stalking these embrasures,
No soldiers to defend
Their squared-off chunk of Rome.

Only the wood below
Walling the fort, founding
What two thousand odd years
Cannot leave unfounded.

Saponis

The island of Saponis rises
Foaming above soapy seas.
Suds beat and froth against its shoreline;
Seabirds hop and gag in scum.
Its rocks are soapstone, soon dissolving
Into the agitant waves.
Brine and hard water undercut cliffs,
Drilling blowholes through the rock
That spout like beached whales into the sky,
Sending up geysers of foam.
Pinkish, bluish, greyish, greenish stone
Gives off a whiff of cheap scent:
Strawberry, mint, ambergris and pine,
Leached into the scouring sea.
Whiter than white, cleaner than clean, wind
Blows bubbles that spritz the sky.

Reviews of The Wood below Coelbren

"In the opening sequence, 'Coelbren', Rees creates a slow and meditative rhythm with careful use of punctuation and enjambmentthat is largely maintained throughout the collection. [...] Rees does well to rally the collection for an inspiring finish in thefinal sequence 'Gazetter'. In particular, his narrative lyric 'In Savonlinna' – one of the collection's longer poems – offersreaders a delightfully superstitious tourist fantasy that calls to mind the atavistic nature of the poems at the opening ofThe Wood below Coelbren."

"This is a collection that rewards several readings. It is slow, meditative - even somnolent at times - and requires severalengagements for the reader to attune attentively to the rhythms and subjects. [...] Rees has an interest in the everyday andwhat the ordinary might reveal in its extraordinariness. [...] This much to commend this collection."

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