Breaking the Chains: Poems & Performance Pieces

Some books are an absolute treat and this is one of them. It is a collection of poems, some published for the first time, others gathered from The Place Where Socks Go and various magazines and anthologies. Presented without illustrations on parchment style paper, medium and content reflect first class quality. Rust s poetry is intelligent but expressed in an accessible language, describing the familiar in an original way. Scenarios include the stables of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; a Christmas dinner party gatecrashed by King Herod; and, for a change, Joseph's perspective on Jesus birth. The pieces vary in length from a few lines to a much longer work, The Sailing of the Ark, a sequence of 45 poems. Written over four years, it charts Rust's spiritual journey away from the security of evangelical fundamentalism. His poetry reveals a spiritual wrestling that confronts and comforts. Quite often, the final line provides an unexpected twist or a challenging question. Drunkard describes what seems to be an alcoholic craving "the thin white warm hard stuff/that lays you out flat", but turns out instead to be an infant demanding a feed. Rust has used many of his poems in live performance. Breaking the Chains could be used for this purpose, or for an enthralling read to tease out the deeper meanings at leisure. --European Bookstore Journal March 1993

Books of Christian based poetry are few and far between but with this fine book Britain clearly has another wordsmith to put alongside the Steve Turners and Stewart Hendersons. In many ways there are echoes of both those poets' work in the 100 odd poems presented here. But that's got nothing to do with any aping of style, it's just that Godfrey too has those poets' laconic wit and taste for clever play on words. My favourites on my first read were his neatly whimsical 'The Place Where Socks Go' (the title of his first privately produced book) while the 45 poems under the heading 'The Sailing of the Ark' really exposes the banality of glib evangelical certainties and ends by revering the paradoxes of our faith. If you buy no other book of poetry this year, search out 'Breaking The Chains'. --Cross Rhythms Magazine February 1993