Output details

So Many Moving Parts

This collection experiments with the limits of the lyric form, especially as it is taught in the context of academic creative writing, where the emphasis is often on the crafting of the balanced epiphany of the first person ‘confessional’ poem, or the ironic and detached voice of the modernist ‘documentary’ poem. These poems, by contrast, open from an apparently stable voice or observation towards a deliberate, arguably unsettling effect of provisionality and ambivalence. Their innovation is at the level of technique rather than content: they use deliberately ‘contrary’ strategies to upset and offset the smoothness and ‘good behaviour’ of the lyric voice, as if challenging Ezra Pound’s famous modernist dictum of ‘Don’ts’ by introducing, for example, a flatfooted or adjectival line, or rhetorical question, or mixture of abstraction and concrete, or elaborate patterning into an otherwise ‘well-behaved’ and naturalistic lyric. These poems are interested in the actual lived frictions of communication, and make these a part of a poetics which accommodates speculation, awkwardness and uncertainty as strands which pull against more familiar techniques in voice and image. These poems draw on critical research published in essay form (“The Uses of Difficulty” and ‘Irrelevant”, not included in this REF submission).