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Partly in Riga and Other Poems

The first section of this book seeks to answer questions about changing relationships between language, geography and identity, and the ways that contemporary life is played out in a correspondence between presence and absence through travel and communications technology. It draws extensively on spatial theory, mainly that of Lefebvre and Massey, theories of the body, and ideas of movement and mobility as expressed in my corresponding monograph, Radical Spaces of Poetry.

The book was partly written while on a month long residency in Riga, Latvia, on an exchange programme that was specifically set up between small countries (Wales and Latvia) in order to explore responses to processes of globalisation through permeable coastlines. As part of the writing process I kept a poetic and photographic diary in the form of a blog that received over 10,000 individual hits. The poems from the blog were then edited and form the first part of this volume.

The second major research question this collection asks is in the final section, ‘The People Poems’. The result of directly observed experience, the poems seek to explore the nature of physical presence in the relationship between the observer and the observed. Based on the presence of the human figure, they explore ideas of familiarity, and the importance of repeated action to the experience of everyday life, thereby offering a counter to the (all too familiar) process of defamiliarisation. Informed by Merleau Ponty and Heidegger, the poetry explores the world of the human figure and the ways that it is phenomenologically constructed.