jubaju's review
3.0
2.5 stars
No matter how often I come here, I am destined to remain not only a stranger, but something more profound: a foreigner. Maybe I might call the first people here my ancestors. But, like me, those ancestors did not belong. Even when they died and the sand packed their brainpans and whistled through their bones, they did not belong. Because belonging is a pipedream. The human condition is one of singularity. The human fate is loneliness. The unbelonging I sense in this landscape between two rivers has become an insistence. Yet, I greet it with something that feels like relief. How many years has it taken me to welcome this region’s rejection. To embrace the fact that I cannot find myself here? Now, what comforts is the awareness that I can never be at home here. Thus, at last, I understand where I am. Finally, the sand makes sense. Only when I accept alienation, my strangerness, this strangerdom, can I become free.
Something I find with Welsh-centric poetry: you either love it or you don’t understand much. This collection was a bit of both. A mix between Celtic references and a study on being a foreigner, I alternated between being completely mirrored in these pages, to reading poems that were not for me. While the entirety of the prose sections of Mouth to Mouth: A Recitation between Two Rivers was beautiful and engaging, the poetry more obscure to me.
No matter how often I come here, I am destined to remain not only a stranger, but something more profound: a foreigner. Maybe I might call the first people here my ancestors. But, like me, those ancestors did not belong. Even when they died and the sand packed their brainpans and whistled through their bones, they did not belong. Because belonging is a pipedream. The human condition is one of singularity. The human fate is loneliness. The unbelonging I sense in this landscape between two rivers has become an insistence. Yet, I greet it with something that feels like relief. How many years has it taken me to welcome this region’s rejection. To embrace the fact that I cannot find myself here? Now, what comforts is the awareness that I can never be at home here. Thus, at last, I understand where I am. Finally, the sand makes sense. Only when I accept alienation, my strangerness, this strangerdom, can I become free.
Something I find with Welsh-centric poetry: you either love it or you don’t understand much. This collection was a bit of both. A mix between Celtic references and a study on being a foreigner, I alternated between being completely mirrored in these pages, to reading poems that were not for me. While the entirety of the prose sections of Mouth to Mouth: A Recitation between Two Rivers was beautiful and engaging, the poetry more obscure to me.
balancinghistorybooks's review
2.0
I read the first third of Robert Minhinnick's Diary of the Last Man, but found that it did not personally appeal to me. There are certainly some interesting thoughts running through it, but it did not feel as though they had been developed enough for the most part. Rather too brief for my liking, on the whole.
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