Recipes for the Disaster

<p>Gareth Jenkins's work reads like rituals or incantations corrupted by the manufactured nature of our modern world while constantly seeking to resist that corruption. Historicity environmental awareness culture and its wars: these themes and their constant transmutation dominate and destabilise the voices in his poems. </p><p><br></p><p>In between the unreliability of language an overarching self-awareness of privilege and the uncertainty of human relations make the book both alien and deeply personal. His is a project intent on an honest heartfelt grandeur of connection all the while haunted by the fear that such human connection is already doomed to a shallow etching of what it might be. </p><p><br></p><p>Recipes for the Disaster is at once bleak mystical and strangely life-affirming; an exploration of mysteries an excavation of hidden failures an exhortation to be better than we have been.</p><p>Michael Aiken</p><p><br></p>