This book does connect. Hool’s work however is elliptical. There is space in terms of layout and in omission of many words e.g. the definite and indefinite article; and in the way the poet refuses to over explain. In the majority of the poems however, space is used with mastery; form and meaning doing a type of tango together for the reader’s delight. Hool gives his reader something to do.

The finest of all for me is Hool’s sequence, "Episodes from St. David’s". Here tantalising snippets of map are reproduced that read with the text, sounding key words and giving a powerful sense of longing and place. Each poem in the sequence has its individual nature and evokes the different moods of an area I know well. The repetition in my favourite of the poems, "A Song" is truly haunting, beating on the reader like sea does a place.

"In the Grace of a Letter" he writes -: "like a swallow this is not my element / but poetry attends / to the state of things" and after spending time with Hool’s collection I feel, not only hungry for more but that as a reader I have been truly attended to.

Hool has been around in south Wales for a time, at the edges of things, vaguely MacSweeney-esque, reticent, but this time he’s pushed himself right into the centre.  Highlight is "Thirteen of Lindisfarne", a celebration of the place and its magic...  If you only try one new poet from Wales this year make it Hool.

Thank goodness for genuine poetry ... Ric Hool with The Bridge.  Ric Hool, a native of Tyneside, is a traveller in love with language, whose poems are enriched with nuggets (shuckle, planish, slidder...) from the Northumbrian word-hoard. There’s an infectious enthusiasm for places, people, experiences and the possibilities of words. ... the symmetrical curves of the text in the sequence ’Thirteen of Lindisfarne’ successfully draw the eye to the rhythms of the sea. In this sequence the writing is spare and windswept, yet wonderfully tactile: a gull is "wing-stiff on a mattress of air" ; surf hisses "its greedy tongue / up & down / wet openings ; grass is "stroked like fur to the nap of the foreshore".

Poem 7 is in Northumbrian dialect, and tells a modern sea-serpent tale with relish - we can almost taste the words (heyem - home; yellhouse - aleouse). Other memorable poems are ’Urban Walking’ and ‘Millennium Statement’, set in the south Wales Valleys; ‘Plea to a Wanton Muse...’, humorous and poignant with some delectable language; and ‘Opthalmic Appointment’ with its great ending: "The regular air / breathed from his nostrils, past my lips - sure / so close, he could kiss my gently tilted face."

The title poem is one in which the father recognises the "otherness" of his daughter in an epiphany which leads him towards a deeper understanding of the world and how it works:

...Guess this is how

seeds get shaken, eventually, away. And how

something else happens

in the world.

Did I say epiphany? Well, perhaps Satori would be a better word because Hool’s imagination is decidedly Zen. It delights in examining nature through enigma and paradox and at the same time, revealing and celebrating the ‘concealed obvious’:

A wind

snakes through the grass:

s.

See what I mean? I loved these poems. They’re full of precise language and thoughtful provocative combinations of lucid images.

‘There is a gently provocative Zen koan effect which confronts the reader with a series of enigmas, of questions; and the poet is not supplying any easy answers, but posing dilemmas that are philosophical, ethical, ecological. It is work that I can read again, knowing that it is durable, poetry that can move with time.’

‘I like it very much and find the firmness and sureness of the lyricism refreshing in this cynical and flaky world. A poet with a joyful soul is rare indeed these days.’

There is nothing bizarre in the people who inhabit the house of Hool. The difficulties are everybody’s problem of flawed communication, general discord, aborted dreams and ambitions. The work has a fragile bitterness, a wry weariness that finds a certain grace in the tensions between individuals, as individuals always do, fall short of one another’s expectations but still cannot find it in themselves to let one another down.’