Short, surreal poems that find the strange at the root of the everyday.

The poems of Sgwâr are brief fragments, flashes of ordinary life seen through a lens bent just slightly out of true. From that small distortion come images no one sees coming: the grim logic which says that, after a break-up, the goldfish must be sawn in half; the square of limp grass left behind when a tent comes down.

These are poems shaved close to the root. Quietly defiant, they rarely raise their voice, and they don't need to, because the ordinary does the unsettling on its own. An artist and researcher working on film-poetry, ap Carys writes with a filmmaker's eye for the single, held frame, and each poem lands like one.

Compact and image-led, the collection travels well. Its humour and its unease live in pictures rather than wordplay, so a reader in any language will recognise the break-up, the goldfish and the pale patch of grass where something used to stand.