Welsh writer Peter Thabit Jones's latest poetry collection, The Lizard Catchers, concerns itself with small things and the small moments of life: ivy climbing a wall, snow melting, the ugly mystique of frogs, lunching in a noisy city pub and, of course, a boyhood quest to capture the small reptiles mentioned in the title. Generally speaking, the thirty-four poems in this collection are also small, in terms of length; most are shorter than a page, and a few less than ten lines. But there is nothing small about Jones's vision or his profound humanity, both of which shine through his musings on such universal subjects as grief, mortality and the innocent cruelty of children, for which his small, everyday subjects serve as unusual and striking portals.

Many of the poems in The Lizard Catchers are set against the backdrop of Jones's native Wales, a landscape that is beautiful, mysterious and sometimes even cozy in the way a hometown feels after several years of living there. Yet nothing feels quaint about the affection Jones obviously feels for Wales in such poems as "Cajo's Farm," 'Weller' and Burning Waste' (here reproduced in full). Here his language can be deceptively simple, each word chosen as carefully as seeds for planting, and the images he creates make his country appear before the reader in all its wild, harsh beauty:

The bonfire flares,
Shredding the black night.
The wooden bones crack.
Smoke, salt-white, departs,
Thinning, vanishing
On its self-made tracks.

The wax faces of children
Are buttered with firelight.

But not all of the poems in The Lizard Catchers are joyful paeans. Jones also sees a darker side of living in his country, which includes painful events he (or at least the persona in some of his poems) experienced, such as a last visit with a dying loved one in 'Home,' the anonymous, noisy loneliness of being in public in "Lunch in a City Pub," the cruelty of children towards innocent animals in "Bunker Frog," and a young man's realization that old age will some day claim him in "A Clock Ticking and an Old Man." Of these more melancholy poems, the collection's true standout is the longer poem "The Cold Cold Corner," a piece in six parts (titled after a line from Edwin Muir's poem "The Child Dying") which Jones wrote for his deceased son, Matthew. It is a profound and highly personal meditation on different stages of grieving as told through the impressions of time and landscape a grieving person often notices most strikingly: changes in weather from warm to cold, the barrenness of nature and the wordlessness of keeping watch over a grave.
From the first section, "Bereavement":

Your head is full of trees
And the leaves have fallen.

Your eyes are full of lakes
And the water's frozen.

Your ears are full of birds
And the songs are stolen.

Your mouth is full of skies
And the clouds are ashen.

Your heart is full of fields
And the grass is barren.

Your soul is full of hills
And the paths are broken .

Your life is full of caves
And the dark is open.

It is not Jones's subject matter alone that makes him a strong poet and his work exemplary. He is an extraordinary poet because he understands, and utilizes, devices and techniques many poets today downplay or discard entirely: namely, rhyme (both external and internal) and meter. As the above quotation may indicate, a poem's rhythm is important to Jones: each line has exactly six syllables and the same pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, which gives the first section of "The Cold Cold Corner" a cadence which feels as grave and measured as a dirge. Jones employs his understanding of meter throughout The Lizard Catchers, in such poems as "My Grandfather's Razor," "Volunteer Work: Special Needs" (a poem about working with special-needs children written in iambic pentameter) and "Watching the Sea: Swansea Bay."

In an age when rhyme is often considered the trademark of an unimaginative poet, or the worst kind of doggerel verse, Jones is also brave enough to use external rhymes in many of his poems, most strikingly in "The Boy and the Lion's Head," a poem about a young boy's terrifying encounter with a lion-shaped rock in Swansea, South Wales. Told from the boy's perspective, the poem uses a combination of hard and soft rhyme to create a feeling of running, and of rising dread:

One Sunday, I crossed Kilvey Hill
And saw a strange, thin man sat still,
By the rock shaped like a lion,
Above Tir John Power Station:
As private as a Nazi camp.
His rough clothes labelled him a tramp.
He beckoned me to join him there,
But I was frozen like a hare.
"Come touch the Lion's Head," he said,
Shout 'Great white eye you're red and dead',
And the stunned sun shall loudly fall
Down on the town's brown streets that sprawl,
By the sea." His voice frightened me.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jones also uses his ear for rhyme to create poetry for children. A few such poems are included near the end of the book, along with another painting by Nick Holly, the cover artist, which details the boys in the title poem shouting in triumph after they have captured the lizards. These seven "bonus" poems further showcase Jones' talent by showing him at his most wide-eyed and innocent, and they are to a poem witty and entirely charming. None, however, is as breathtaking as "Spring", a four line concrete poem which provides visuals of the land waking up after a long winter sleep, such as a breeze "b I o w i n g" [each letter in a larger point size] and a cat "c. . r. . e. .e. . p. . i. . n. .g." Elementary teachers who read this collection would do well to inquire about using these and any of Jones's other children's poems in their classrooms, as they illustrate the mechanics of poetry and truly speak to children's sense of wonder.

At times joyous and at times melancholy, The Lizard Catchers is an excellent new collection from one of Wales's premier poets. Not only for fans of world literature (and literature from the United Kingdom, in particular), it is also a desirable collection for any reader who appreciates well-crafted language and the skilful employment of traditional techniques.

Joselle Vanderhooft, The Pedestal Magazine USA

Welsh Books Council Review - The Lizard Catchers

GWales.com review by Clare Maynard
(With the permission of the Welsh Books Council)