A debut book. The acknowledgements suggest that he deserved it - he'd already had a pamphlet published, had been in many magazines (PN Review, Poetry Review) and some books, had won a Gregory and had been placed in competitions (National Poetry Competition, etc). He'd also received criticism and advice about the poems from Armitage, Burnside, Polly Clark, etc.
Quite a few of the endings are open rather than closed, or at least expansive - e.g. "Wintering" ends
There is in this world one snow fall. Everything else is just weather.
There's plenty of threshold imagery - gates and windows feature, but more especially [open] doors and [closed] eyes
- "If I close my eyes" (p.11), "flint of eyes" (p.25), "as your eye closes ( ...your closed eye) and opens" (p.36), "I close my eyes" (p.39), "You close your eyes" (p.41)
- "open door" (p.14), "the open and close of a back door" (p.27), "he opened his door" (p.31), "to open the door" (p.31), "shopdoor bell" (p.34)
He sometimes uses spacing within lines, and line-feeds with carriage returns - e.g. "One" has
untellable, a curve away.
One day
we will surely pull into ourselves,
meeting-up in loop
I like "Skin Contact". I like "Nymph" too, though the lines are too short for me. "Isostasy" is rhymed. "It Rains During the Night" is in 4-lined stanzas, the lines staggered so that the first line isn't indented and the last night is thrice-indented. "The River Drivers" has an opportunity for line-breaking that the poet found hard to resist.
leaping
from
log
to
log
