What Planet

The poems in Miriam Gamble’s third collection journey surreally through scenes and landscapes at once of the world and of the mind: in these questing missives from ‘reality’s upended cage’, ‘nothing can be claimed self-evident’. By turns uncanny, dark, poignant and uproarious, What Planet sets the individuality of perception and the inventiveness of memory against fixed certainties, probing chaos and madness in a post-truth world. Rhythmically propulsive and dizzyingly inter-connective, Gamble’s new work is as formally adventurous as it is conceptually distinctive, stretching syntax, jumbling the solid and spectral, crossing borders of time and space. Yet this is also a collection pained by loss, and passionate to connect with a life’s ‘vacated’ corners - even if the act of remembering is as much creation as recovery.