Review: Silver Branch by Kevan Manwaring
A fabulous, informed review from a talented wordsmith. Lorna knows her Celtic legends, and the craft of the bard, intimately – so this makes for fascinating reading…
Silver Branch is a collection of poetry by Kevan Manwaring charting 25 years of dedication to the bardic path. It brings together poems from over a dozen collections selected on the basis that Kevan has performed them in public from memory or they lend themselves to recitation.
The book opens with ‘Speak Like Rain: Letters to a Young Bard’. These letters were ‘inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous sequence to the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus’. Kevan adopts the persona of Tallyessin (Taliesin) speaking to his former self, Gwion Bach.
Taliesin, the shining-browed bard of inspired poetry in the Brythonic tradition, is central to Kevan’s work. Taliesin is not just a role model. Like the bards of ancient Britain Kevan not only seeks inspiration from Taliesin but channels his presence. He describes how this has transformed his performance:
‘When I first started to work with the master bard, Taliesin Penbierdd…
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