Extravagant Stranger
Told through prose-poetry, Extravagant Stranger is a very different memoir. Daniel Roy Connelly generously invites us to read about some intensely personal memories alongside humorous and intriguing recollections of his life. In his debut work, we read about stories of school bullies, adolescent crushes, sex, travel, birth and near-death experiences. Connelly’s expertise is the way he seems able to reach back and touch the past with his fingertips and recall, for us, exactly how it felt. This acute insight gives his poems their fullness, detail and intensity. Connelly’s eye is at once ordinary and extraordinary – he manages to depict trivial things with a poignancy that makes them interesting, while not excluding his readers. It often feels as though the poet’s eye is our own.
Amid the liveliness and wit of this collection, there are beautifully quiet moments, too. Between places in which “the sun runs riots” (‘Valium afternoons in Bangladesh, 1992-1995’) and places “for which the word immaculate exists” (‘Immaculate’), there are also quiet lows. Tender tragedy is reserved predominantly for Connelly’s poems about family. ‘The Ferrari in Fenchurch Street’, describing the poet’s visit to his ill father, contains one of the most striking images of the book: “I take your knuckles into my fists like I’m shielding abandoned eggs”.
As Connelly looks back on the past, he divides time into moments on which he muses, moments he laughs at and puzzles at, and moments which he regrets. But he never ponders too long. Extravagant Stranger’s biggest triumph is that it is expertly paced; it reads like well-rehearsed jokes. Smart and composed, here is poetry that fools you into thinking that writing poetry this good is as easy as breathing.
Extravagant Stranger is published by www.littleislandpress.co.uk