There's a video of the title piece. The poem’s ok, ending with “Come midnight, throw/ a glow-in-the-dark frisbee/ off the highest point in town.” though I don’t think any of those line-breaks are needed.
I like “Funeral Song”. “Critical praise for my last relationship” is based on a good idea, but stutters. “Scotch corner” and “Casino exit” have lots of thematic detail but do they add up to much? I don’t get “The school counsellor”. “Something detonates” begins with “We woke to the sound of one hand clapping” then puzzles me - I don’t get passages like “On the front of his newspaper, through a pixel veil,/ we saw the deadly brainteaser for ourselves,/ discharging endless multiple choices/ onto the smouldering tarmac, while the caption/ ran optimistically through interrogative pronouns”. I don’t get the 5 page “Experiment to determine the existence of love”
Overall, too centrifugal for my tastes.
Other reviews
- Cristopher Horton (The problematic tag ‘performance poet’ does Sutherland a disservice if taken in isolation, for while many of these poems work on one level as performance pieces, they also reward rereading ... For all his bravado, Sutherland is also a romantic in the purest sense. ... More generally, the transitory nature of experience acts as one of the main threads of the collection.)
