Hourglass

DEBUT This first work of fiction by poet Goddard (whose poetry collection For the Chorus was a William Blake Prize runner-up) reads as a purposefully poetic novel. The ongoing series of descriptive phrases paint the interior mental space of a narrator, seemingly male, who waxes poetic about his lover, seemingly female. Descriptions of various sex acts involving a candle inject an interestingly offbeat charge into the narrative. A slew of successive free-verse couplets describe a typical lovelorn obsession in a somewhat atypical way; the intense level of description and analysis devoted to domestic life creates a novel frisson. A little more than halfway through the exegesis, the hourglass turns, and the couple split up. There proceeds a much more satisfying anti-panegyric about the endurance of loss and suffering and various bizarre coping strategies. The description in this section is much more brutally honest, including a studied critique of wage slavery. The way the narrator engages with the breakup is both captivatingly described and depressingly authentic, creating a Bukowski-esque feeling of complete revelry in lonely desolation.