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Welcome to the Poetry Portal for Xibalba Books, Bruce Rimell's unique publishing imprint and the outlet for beautiful poetry publications from his vast archive of poetic work. The Research Portal can be found here. Each book is beautifully presented, and designed with an artist's eye so as to delight the reader. From here you can purchase poetry titles such as Echoes For Aphrodite and Bloodhoney Songs, as well as earlier works such as Nine Nights Awake and Wanderer. Please check out my LULU BOOKSHOP for all my research and poetry titles. |
:: Contemporary Works (2024 onwards) ::
:: Click here to visit my LULU BOOKSHOP :: :: Click here to read my 'Poet Bio' ::
I am steadily moving from a ‘wild outsider’ kind of poet into a creative space which at times parallels mainstream literary zeitgeists. Current works include Echoes For Aphrodite, a poetic travelogue to the Greek island of Milos, which was shortlisted for the 2024 Poetry Book Award, as well as Elegies And Dirty Truths, a cathartic and sordid journey into dark Queer places within, written in a wired, savage voice. Future publications include Afterimages, a meditative semi-autobiographical work, and Vallum Aelium, a psychogeographic travelogue to Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland.
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:: Transitional Works (2021-24) ::
:: Click here to visit my LULU BOOKSHOP :: :: Click here to read my 'Poet Bio' ::
My decision in 2021 to foreground my poetic work in my creative life unleashed a torrent of frenetic creativity, which aside from Wanderer came mostly in the form of longform, garrulous and rather crazed travelogues in which mythicism, animism and hyperactivity were emphasised in my responses to landscape. These are difficult and near-unreadable outsider works, each embracing the common theme of a dreaming fall and confinement. They include Bloodhoney Songs, an exploration of a poetic self in the mythical musicality of the Icelandic landscape; Shapes Of Shiny Brow, an expansive encounter with the medieval Welsh poet-prophet Taliesin; and Nine Nights Awake, a wild, decentralised epic-poem-cum-epic satire which forms a kind of experimental autobiography.
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In April 2023, Bruce Rimell released his most ambitious poetic work to date: 'Nine Nights Awake', a complex, de-centralised, meandering tour through his creative, queer, and hyperactive inner life. ‘Nine Nights Awake’ is all at once, a kind of thematically arranged autobiography of an idiosyncratic inner life, with all its feelings, colours, dreams, armchair philosophies and psychological agilities; an epic poem grounded in fragments of Celtic and Germanic myth telling the story of a lost soul found; an ad-hoc set of narrative allegories from personal, gay/Queer, neurodiverse, contemporary and archetypal human life; an extensive artist’s talk enfolded into a dreaming fall and confinement; an intimate and winding conversation with the soul; a lengthy meditation upon the Medieval Welsh poem ‘Preiddeu Annwn’ attributed to Taliesin, which in turn liberates further personal musings on poetry itself; and a radically parallel series of multiple threads, sidenotes, sidetracks, circular narratives, premonitions, postmonitions and quirky references, misquotes, paraphrased song lyrics and other inspirations… all rolled into one! |
:: Formative/Archive Works (1990s-2021) ::
:: Click here to visit my LULU BOOKSHOP :: :: Click here to read my 'Poet Bio' ::
In 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic, I realised that I had been a poet for longer than I had been an artist, and that it was time to bring this latent creative flow into the foreground. In the years 2010-11, I had self-published two poetic works – Xibalba Songs and Minver Stories – which were re-published in new editions. These were followed by four more poetic projects – of which Ta Sba Balamil Ta Ch’ulel is the highlight – as well as a retrospective of poems from the 1990s to 2020, and a heavily re-written autobiographical novella, Hangman Starman.
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