Published 2023. Paperback, 120pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619012 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The original idea of “paintings on glass” was to get close to folk art. After a long period attempting to learn Gaelic and Welsh, this new poetry is saturated in folklore and myth. The paintings are a distribution of cultured art motifs to rural households, patterns copied onto glass with feathers or brushes made of marten-hair. They are an expression of humility towards the illiterate. The idea of cultural difference being the effect of distribution technology was illustrated by the peddlers who carried the glass panes around the villages of central Europe. The interest in shopping follows a previous and prolonged interest in manufacturing and production, completing the sequence. Reminiscences of childhood and the wreck of the great High Street department stores around 2020 combine in a personal mythology of grand motifs and elaborate ruins.

This is a new start after a long period of silence and begins with an inventory of concrete facts around the poet, in his home in Nottingham, close to where he grew up. One theme is defeaturing, the recreation of court and metropolitan art forms in a simpler manner. Radiant messages broken up by distance.

A statue park around The Mall allows for a re-enactment of the history of the State.‘Tautology’ is a poem about neuroscience as something setting out to replace self-awareness as an account of how the mind works. It gives a history of the self as a block on perception, behind which an intact world hides. Where the claim to omnipotence of the ego is ruined by the cosmic impartiality of light.

‘Dr Mabuse meets Dr Marcuse’ tells an adventure in which the famed theorist of de-repression and ‘one-dimensional man’ faces the more famous super-villain of Weimar cinema, and they struggle for the future of California and its beaches.

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