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To Hell with Paradise. New and Selected Poems.

This volume begins with a section of 25 New Poems. Many of these poems are oblique and elusive: ‘Gremlins’, with its listing of diverse indistinctnesses, could be taken as the keynote poem. The poems are concerned with mortality and loss. This subject is often treated with formal minimalism and restraint, as in the two lyric sequences ‘Airs’ and ‘Knots’. It is sometimes treated more playfully and wittily, as in ‘Therapeutically Speaking’, ‘Static’, ‘The Possible’, and ‘ PIN’. The latter poem is in the ‘voice’ of a cash machine teasing its user. In general these poems reveal a reflective consciousness talking to itself about its self-consciousness, using language that turns on itself in word-play, irony and paradox, signified most evidently by the poems ‘You and Not You’ and ‘Self Efface’.