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Atkins’ texts are unprecedented. His work gets stronger, more varied in tone, more versatile in every way. He has gone from a studied neutrality of registration to more personal inflections, emphatic, insistent, uncompromising in their eclectic mixing of registers, choosing stark combinations of abstract and concrete because the truth can only be delivered that way. Paradoxically, his phases of misgiving and seeming indirection force his writing to fight back in more and more decisive modes of predication. When the world out there is not cooperating properly, the world in here is being given its marching orders in no uncertain terms. The great thing is he has gained as much control over the writing as he has for so long over the imagemaking - and the connections between the two are becoming more and more inescapable. -Rod Mengham
I have been enjoying this new collection tremendously. Looking back on Atkins’ earlier collections, I was struck by a strange mixture of continuity and rupture. Some of the pieces are more radically disjunctive than before, which, to me, gives them a sense of immediacy and makes them more performative . I also feel the influence of Beckett’s later work (in pieces like Fourth Night ). As always I appreciated the clarity and visuality of his prose and its capacity to engage with aesthetic and philosophical issues while generating powerful images, whether they are flamboyant or quietly meditative or somewhere in between. Another fine book of ‘irresponsible texts’!
-Michel Delville
