Limited edition (200) hand-stitched poetry pamphlet, with tracing paper insert. Cover is recycled 500g cairn board, printed on a Heidelberg Platen 1976 letterpress. Published autumn 2015.
Design: Andy Garside.
Reviews:
“Hanes offers the reader an apparently more measured approach to language through the introduction of Welsh with a typographical play that serves to disturb habitual forms of predictive reading. McKeand opens up the chasm that is the new conceptual and emotional field of learning a language.
Any notion of a single grand narrative of History, Hanes, is ruptured through mulitple voices that produce an instability of subject. Like the Biblical Song of Songs, ‘I and you’, ‘she and he’, ‘her and him’, the binary is evaded through gendered displacement. There is no single narrator and the vocalities become animal, bird, landscape and place: it is a world of becoming.
The effect on temporality displaces the causal chain of hanes into the treigladau of Welsh: the mutations attached to the gender of the noun, personhood of the verb, and the possessive, enact a contemporary unease. The central sequence psycholingualgeography articulates the instability of time and the necessiry of re-writing our histories:
‘there is no time –
inthis landofgiants
exists
existed
existing
extinct
diodde’
thereistoomuchtime
it lies everywhere
I see now that you did not understand her
(we all rewrite history) roedd
rhaid i ni’
This is a poetry that enacts a drive into the material of language, digging and pushing against the order of things… The tropes of mutation and the brevity of life, picked up here as twice born ‘dysgu (lle)’ when learning about a place is learning a language:
‘I cannot hold the ocean
ewch ati hi
fallintothewater
& be reborn’
Poetry Wales Spring 2017, Volume 52
“The title poem grapples with these concepts through the language of felting, disrupting ruminations through a variety of techniques. Words have their letters wrenched apart, spaces and hyphens are inserted, knitting instructions work their way in (‘k2 sl1 k1 psso’). Yet, while these might all sound quite alienating, the result is still lyrical.”
Sabotage Review