A Spillage Of Mercury

by Neil Rollinson

This is a bawdy, Rabelaisian first collection of poems by a new writer. They celebrate life in all its diversity and the language used moves from lyrical to the vernacular.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published June 6, 1996

Reviews

[David]

Rollinson's blank verse, conversational poetry covers a range of subjects, but often returns to sex and the reimagining of mythic and Biblical scenes. He is particularly fond of using everyday speech and vocabulary in contrast to more poetic expression. Some of the pieces seemed insubstantial to me, but the best vibrate with keen perception and striking imagery.

[Julia]

I wanted to like this collection more than I did as I generally like Rollinson's work. There were individual poems that I really liked, but others felt like clever ideas for poems but, for me at least, lacked depth - that extra something that makes me want to go back to a poem and read it again. Others in the collection were sexual almost to the point of being crass. I am certainly not prudish about sexual imagery in poems - however I didn't feel here that the poems were doing enough else as poems - for example making some comment on humanity and how we relate to one another.