Poets and Poems: Michael Pederson and “Oyster”

Have you told someone “I love you” with the “mechanical bareness of a warden clamping a car?” Have you felt someone’s skin zip around you? Is your moon face full like a Christmas belly? Have you read a poem about a peeping Tom, or about a conversation overheard in the dentist’s office? How about a free personality test administered by the Church of Scientology?

This is Oyster, a collection of poems by Scottish poet Michael Pederson.

To call this collection jarring doesn’t do it justice. In fact, it’s difficult to come up with a single word of description that does it justice. Irreverent. Provoking. Odd. Disturbing. Funny. Way off. Way out. Creative. Not-like-anything-you-ever-read-before poems. The 48 individual poems often sound (when read aloud) like what you might imagine a gang of Scottish toughs to sound like, including the dialect. They sound like conversations you might imagine young men having, smoking cigarettes as they stand around barrel fires in shady parts of Glasgow or Edinburgh on a cold night.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.