Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

To see reason and clarity you must first break the chains that tie you down, which bind you to the prison others have created, and which you cannot envisage freedom. That which offers no escape is the greatest reason to keep fighting.

Poetry is that means of escape, whether you sit in your room and write with flowing passion, each word carrying its own sentence, or furtively, secretly, behind a cell within a cell, poetry is the glory in the shape of a key that sets the soul and mind free, which offers solace, redemption, the chance to apologise where none may even act contrite in your presence. Music is the healer of time, but poetry is the means in which balance can be first achieved, it is your story set to its first set of rhythm, to the beat of your own heart.

To grasp this truth is to set the terms of your release, and it does not come easy, your own mind will decide the length of service that your soul will commit to; and it is in that vein of honesty to which G R P Janes testifies in her debut collection, I’ll Write A Book Of Poetry. 

It takes strength to place yourself before your peers and declare the world in which to be remembered within, no titles for each personal observation, confession or feeling to be dwelled upon, and for G R P Janes this approach works well, for it has the continual feel of life at a pace, a drama unfolding forever as each female led narrative displays hidden anger, a purity of memory, and the fierce retort to those that blind their captives and leave their tied to chains forged in early life.

I’ll Write A Book Of Poetry, and never apologise for it, for why should the truth of the soul feel anything but unburdened by the reveal. G R P Janes has understood that at a young pivotal age, that we each hold the key to our release, that we have been our own jailors, and that with generosity of language we can, if not be set free, at least be the guide for others to walk out of the cell with a lighter touch that what we ourselves have suffered.

An intriguing debut, an opportunity to lay down the freedom to which the artist argues rightly for; an absorbing detailed journal of poetry in which the poet should be justly proud.

Ian D. Hall