Heat Wave

Heat Wave is a form of poetic cabaret,What good is sitting, alone in your room?/ come hear the music play! If a cabaret is full of high jinks it can also land punches truth can be masked by the burlesque and the grotesque: Tell all the truth but tell it slant. Luke Kennard has said of Stannards writing, I know of few other poets who can write of cruelty, hysteria and disappointment with such levity and grace. Will Eaves speaks of a comic vitality. Heat Wave seeks to unsettle and wrong-foot; it refuses to adopt a sententious or holier than thou attitudes regarding the many crises which confront us. The poems subvert as well as entertain. Critics have noted a tonal control and simultaneous considerations of matters mordant and gleeful. The reader might weep and laugh on the same page. The lyrical and the demotic might walk hand in hand.