The power of ‘telling it slant’

Ben Rhys Palmer's Breakfast with the Scavengers is a dazzling debut that fuses apocalyptic nightmares with humour and dreams of hope, writes Jenny White

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IGH on a mountain, a yeti rescues a mountaineer and nurses him back to health; fish gods who taught people to love and sing now only open and close their mouths silently; and on an apocalyptic beach, a couple drinks knockoff Champagne as fish jump from the simmering sea and ashes rain down.

Ben Rhys Palmer's debut poetry collection is a breathtaking dance on the edge of time, the edge of the world. His magical realist visions of talking animals, fantastical beasts, gods and giants, feel truer than what generally passes as reality. But as he tells me, he’s a longstanding fan of Emily Dickinson's advice to “tell the truth, but tell it slant”

‘There's an element of duality to these poems about the end of the world: despair, certainly, but also clear glimmers of hope: the giant in Leonora Carrington’s ‘The Giantess (‘The Guardian of the Egg) carries an egg that will one day hatch to release a “bright, feathered creature” that will “gobble up all our sorrows’, and “soar above the surface of a sorrowless world’

Carrington painted The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) in Mexico, which is where Palmer now lives. He grew up in Cardiff, studied at Cardiff University, lived in Barcelona for a decade and then moved to Mexico, where his day job is writing declarations for people seeking sanctuary in the US, turning heartbreaking interviews into emotive declarations written in the client's voice.

It's gritty work, telling real stories of abuse, exploitation and people trafficking - but he is pleased to be making meaningful use of language.

“I'm helping people in quite a practical way, with my words, which is quite unusual for a poet, because sometimes we can feel like everything we do is a bit airy fairy, and doesn’t really have much of an impact in the real world,” he says.