Zanzibar Light

These poems play with the endlessly malleable form of the sonnet, across a spectrum of tone and register, from traditional to terminals. They are in the innovative traditions of contemporary poetry that are willing to explore and remediate any of the conventions of the poetic archive.

In the longer form poems shifting states of consciousness are tagged to scraps of language and mysteriously resonant scenes of contemporary life. The emphasis is always on the ephemeral, the intersections of dreamscapes with the barely noticeable strata of everyday life. The sentences are always close to ordinary, but unafraid to follow the runs of association and blockage generated by language itself.

‘This is a book of cross-talking voices coming from the same source. Meditative poems about landscape necessarily collide and upend the tangents of modernity, the ironies of the civilized. The sonnets in the book work individually and collectively, and there’s an underlying journey in search of equanimity and knowledge but constantly being confronted and re-routed by the insensitivities, opportunisms and commercial brutalities of a corporate and controlling world.’ – John Kinsella