Title: Wide Boy
Description: Rather than conceding to its blusterous promise of showmanship
and flashy criminality, "Wide Boy", the title poem of Phillip Crymble's
debut short collection, works, on the contrary, as a thematic locus for the
tender ironies and self-effacing negations so often encountered throughout
the book. Whether meditating on the cultural landscape of his native
Belfast, unpacking the "politics of friendship", or striving to illuminate
the root cellars and other dark corners of ordinary household experience,
Crymble's writing is both playful and provocative, reverent and elegiac. In
his endorsement of Wide Boy, Simon Armitage writes that "pop culture,
punch-lines and poetry find an easy and admirable accommodation here".
That Phillip Crymble manages to so seamlessly unify comedic impulses,
populist concerns, and prosodic erudition in these poems not only announces
his arrival as an emerging talent, it also distinguishes him as a writer of
considerable invention, and as a poet well worth watching.
Places: Belfast