Small-Scale Observations

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The poems in James Sutherland-Smith’s eighth collection move from the garden into the neighbourhood of a down-at-heel Hapsburg town and then range into the nearby forest, the personal and the past. Borders are crossed and seemingly insignificant creatures suddenly gain visionary dimensions. The title poem recalls a poet whose attention to the small-scale made his work seem minor, yet as Hardy wrote he noticed such things, a heedfulness absent in a contemporary world where both simplistic analysis and solutions constantly fail to address threats to our very existence.

The namesake of a war criminal has been chopping wood for three days hefting an orange-handled axe. Behind him three hunting dogs bark at the nonchalant passage of a cat.