KIND WORDS
Some lovely people have said some lovely things about my writing
...a great deal of 'poetic intelligence', a certain kind of intellectual poise which means the poems can, at best, have an ingenious quality. There is a an impressive sense of micro-management, where the work as a whole is quickened by echoes and motifs, word games, slippages and symmetries; and admirable restraint which leaves an undercurrent of philosophical anxiety, as if , in a very civilised way, the poems [are] operating a kind of psycho-surgery; these pieces are never solipsistic but rather they probe and navigate and play with language - there's wit and some moments of elegant riffing and always a sense of control and formal experiment. Great!
Excellent, eclectic... poems. They are strong and powerful... [with an] excellent use of imagery that draws the reader in so that they get totally lost in [the] poems.
Sometimes you come across a piece that doesn't conform, doesn't sit still, dances around and plays with form and everything you try to normalise - knowing too well that rules... can be broken. This is such a piece. And yet there is a symmetry to it which defies the logic of fiction. There is also good pacing, a series of really good ideas and an astonishingly well written series of pages... like Ishiguro's The Hidden Giant, the thoughts I have are... engaged in a different way of seeing. Could I see Julien... could he see the woman...? It floats like that, a shimmering discourse of events which may or may not have taken place - 'she wasn't there. Or rather, he wasn't.'
A painter's eye for physical details and a poet's eye for character. There's something bewitching about [the] story; it reads, in parts, like a dark fairy-tale;
it has an otherworldly quality about it that elevates it above the naturalistic...
Affecting and emotionally stimulating...
There is some exceptionally sharp motif work that collides our associative meaning throughout; we end up in various baths, beds, trains and windows that expand on the previous handlings of those objects. What is most wonderful about these journeys is that a reader is disassociated from the body in the process which makes the reading all the more visceral, yet pinned to various characters, personas, the 'I' - we are rarely lost, despite the many attempts to lose us. The voice and intention of this work is clear, inspired and interested in reaching into the everyday objects of our menial lives and transforming them into something for more revelatory.