Wide Boy

Rather than conceding to its blusterous promise of showmanship and flashy criminality, "Wide Boy", the title poem of Phillip Crymble's debut short collection, works, on the contrary, as a thematic locus for the tender ironies and self-effacing negations so often encountered throughout the book. Whether meditating on the cultural landscape of his native Belfast, unpacking the "politics of friendship", or striving to illuminate the root cellars and other dark corners of ordinary household experience, Crymble's writing is both playful and provocative, reverent and elegiac. In his endorsement of Wide Boy, Simon Armitage writes that "pop culture, punch-lines and poetry find an easy and admirable accommodation here". That Phillip Crymble manages to so seamlessly unify comedic impulses, populist concerns, and prosodic erudition in these poems not only announces his arrival as an emerging talent, it also distinguishes him as a writer of considerable invention, and as a poet well worth watching.