Ian Seed - Shifting Registers

Paperback, 82pp, 8.5x5.5ins
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With a fragmented yet rich lyricism, Shifting Registers crosses borders between lost and rediscovered identity. The voices in the poems may be tentative and vulnerable, regretful and haunting, or playful and provocative, as they relive and re-imagine half-remembered journeys and encounters. That which has become strange through its distance in the past becomes once again familiar, while that which is near in the present begins to be unknowable. Shifting Registers seeks to reconcile the two, and to construct a wholeness for the future, yet without resort to easy answers or false resolution. Throughout, there is delight in the navigation of different realities and new spaces through language.

"The mystery and sadness of empty rooms, chance encounters in the street, trains traveling through a landscape of snow become magical in Ian Seed's poems. Influenced by European surrealism, (the poetry of Reverdy, the paintings of De Chirico and Picasso's classical period come to mind) they strike a complex chord that is completely original — 'the hand which paints/becomes a part of the picture,/a story in itself.'" — John Ashbery

Read a review by CJ Allen at Litter here.

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