Author: Gerald Cox
Date: 08/11/20

New contemporary poet Lloyd Rees added to Listen to Poetry

Listen to Poetry is very pleased to announce another addition to our contemporary poets section. We would like to welcome Lloyd Rees to the site and are very glad he has chosen to share his poems with us. We have selected poems from The Two of Us, a collection of modern poems that explores three key relationships in his life, with his mother, daughter and wife. The relationship with his mother is explored in The Wreck, The Old House and Going Back. In the opening poem of our recordings Release Date he sets the tone of what feels like a difficult and sometimes painful relationship dynamic with his mother.

I called her ‘The Mother’ as if it were a title,
but ‘Ma’ to her face because it sounded harder
than mam or mummy – she was too brittle
and she came and went more like a warder.

A very different relationship with his daughter is explored in Sailors, Lost and The Artists. Lost gives a vivid description of every parent’s nightmare of losing a child in a busy airport!

Never so filled with despair
I ran through that concourse
as if I was on fire,
a father filled with a father’s force.

The tone and feeling of the poems change again in The Bear, Cowbridge and Actually where aspects of his relationship with his wife are explored. We get elements of wry humor in The Bear, Cowbridge

It can’t be all Budapest Rome and Paris:
at times we smile and jointly know
that it’s good to stretch out on our settee terrace.

Perhaps we ought to add to that a fourth relationship with himself is present in all these poems particularly ‘The Two of Us’

I, that entity I half know, half don’t,
am more than that, that one bare thing.
I’m two at least, the will, the won’t,
the parts that fight to cleave and cling.

We would like to thank Lloyd for his poems and his very positive cooperation with Listen to Poetry. We look forward to more of his work in the future.

Listen to Poetry is interested in working with contemporary poets and translators of poetry to help promote their work. We can create a poet’s or translator’s page with readings of your poems and links to your websites or publications etc. We also have an efficient social media program on going, that promotes Listen to Poetry on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest and we will be adding YouTube soon. If you are interested in this please be in touch with us and send some of your work. We will then assess whether or not we feel we can help you.