Alun Cooper

Shades Alun Cooper

Travel stretches the sense. The sights, savours and sounds offer new varieties of experience abroad, and the author of Shades has done good service in recording them. His keen eye notes the subtle shapes and contradictions that slide across the threshold of perception, whether were in New York, Cairo or Karachi. But always there's the doppleganger of the self that haunts the traveller. With it comes doubt, pain and melancholy. . . as well as the beauty of night landscapes, the eerie spectres of abandonment, the call of absent lovers and the tumult of ecstasy. The poet's opening image - of a village drowned by a lake - somehow pervades this whole collection, as if the shadows of the world drown out its bright beauty. But balancing these concepts is the poet's task, and that is what he's done so effectively here in Shades.