Lyrical and at times unsettling, The Somnambulist Cookbook explores the quality of disappearance, slowly breaking down as the poems swing from rogue sonnets to fractured prose poems, reminiscent of Larkin, but if he had gone abroad and listened to Pavement rather than jazz.
Lyrical and at times unsettling, The Somnambulist Cookbook explores the quality of disappearance, slowly breaking down as the poems swing from rogue sonnets to fractured prose poems, reminiscent of Larkin, but if he had gone abroad and listened to Pavement rather than jazz. These are poems which haunt the margins of who and what we are, searching for something that has left only a trace on the barbed wire of our nerves.
Andrew McDonnell's debut, The Somnambulist Cookbook, is a mixture of the strange and the ordinary in a clash that generates humour and unease [. . .] McDonnell's unsettling sense of humour engages with characters that are recognisable but never stereotypical, as well as cultural jetsam, such as "an orange Cortina", abandoned in an escapist "edgeland" (Everyone Loves a Mystery). As we struggle to come to terms with how we got here - hollowing out of vital national services; sleep walking into globalisation; blithely thinking we could have it all forever, McDonnell shows we are complicit actors in our own demise.
-- Lisa Kelly * Magma Poetry *