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Cusp

Cusp is a full-length collection of poems in free verse forms sometimes underpinned by irregular rhyming and half-rhyming methods and exploring lineation that breaks free from left-hand justification to occupy the page. The poems are pre-occupied with language, location, politics, culture and human interactions with nature in settings as diverse as Yorkshire, Nigeria, Uganda and Europe. Travel was both a research method and stimulus for the work; a form of ‘action research’ where the poem forms a reflection or mediation upon events, locations, histories.

The collection also contains a long poem ‘Electricity’ which originally arose from work as writer in residence on the ‘Creative Scientist’ project in Shropshire schools (2001). The research method for this involved interviews with groups of students and adults, recorded as sound files, followed by the kinetics of composition and more formal research into the history of science and contemporary explanations of scientific phenomena. The poem has a playful narrative voice (the voice of electricity itself) and a sinuous structure composed of alternately indented free-form lines that abjure conventional punctuation. The poem attempts a (partial) history of technology and an exploration of human society, culture, violence and even perception itself, with electricity as the essential spark of consciousness. The experimental music and performance group Helactite, based in Newcastle, will be performing a multi-media version of the poem in November 2013.

Poems in Cusp have appeared in leading literary journals including The Rialto, The North, Poetry Review as well as being anthologised in the Best British Poems 2012 (Salt) and Versions of the North and Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry (Five Leaves, 2013). Cusp was featured in The Telegraph’s “Best New Poetry Collections” column, and has been positively reviewed in online forums and in leading literary journals such as Poetry Review and The North.