Praise for The Glassblower’s House
‘Matt Bryden’s meditation on the birth of his child makes, in his words, “a story of everything”. The Glassblower’s House is a capture of brilliance, of old light fading out, dear life thrillingly and memorably clung to.’ Glyn Maxwell
‘All morning with the read-at-one-sitting (but pondered-over-and-over-again!) slant-telling of @Matt_Bryden‘s just-published @LiveCanon collection The Glassblower’s House with its savouring of words, its bleak and oblique vision, its ominous rabbits and owls, a continual weaving between the personal, the practical and the hyper-real, its Vertigo and Dancing Lane and Porlock and bedtime stories and Châos… a rare ability to render askew the everyday while making the unexpected seem somehow strangely familiar!’ Cahal Dallat
‘Matt Bryden is a poet of subtlety and measure whose work remains below the radar: it’s his precision and acumen, coupled (and wounded by) his experiential knowledge that gives this material real weight – a sense of real pain – so that the lightest of touches is made by a scalpel, rather than a pencil, and the everyday, domestic, environment becomes a sphere of seething emotion. Yet, there’s a sunniness to it all: something like love, it must be, irradiates from the pages in Bryden’s descriptions of his daughter, especially. I think this is a work of great courage and that Bryden possesses a pertinent and unique voice in the scene as it stands.’ Kirsten Norrie (MacGillivray) One of her 3 best books of 2023 for Broken Sleep
‘With its carefully crafted contents and thought-provoking themes, this collection leaves an indelible impression on the reader’s heart and mind.’ Ashley Lister, Writing in Education
Launched at the Bedford in Balham alongside pamphlets by Isabella Mead and Josephine Corcoran on Sunday 21st May 2023, The Glassblower’s House details pregnancy, birth, the consequent pressures on a relationship, separation and a new start, all from a father’s perspective. The tone is not bitter, rather seeking co-existence with the past and present. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a touchstone through these examinations of two relationships – one continuing, one drawing to a close – as items are turned like photos in a private investigator’s hands. Could things have been halted? Could they have gone another way?
A meditation on the birth and raising of a child against a backdrop of personal catastrophe, the title references the transformative art of glass-blowing – through ritual and the heat of the furnace creating something beautiful, fragile and, ultimately, useful.
The Glassblower’s House was a winner of the 2023 Live Canon Pamphlet Prize. Buy a copy here and read an interview about the pamphlet here.
I read three poems from the pamphlet a while back in lockdown – ‘Preservation Spell,’ ‘Crossing the Owl’s Bridge’ and ‘Epicentre’:
and, back in the day, ‘Janus’ (then called ‘January’).
For a poetical, in-depth analysis of one of the poems, this sortie to Glyn Maxwell’s Dark Canadee is unmissable: The Fourth Voyage
Matt Bryden Poetry 