Full Description
This follows a 12-year year halt, and the first product of the new phase was With Feathers on Glass (2023). 'A history of shopping' was started around 2003 and falls on both sides of the gap. That series deals with exchange and retailing, as a successor to a prolonged interest in manufacturing and production. "The Goths as inventors of tourism", deals with the legend of wealth and culture as the motive which leads barbarians from the world-periphery to surge towards the Mediterranean as if to a shopping mall. The flow of goods lifts people off their feet, is like a river of dreams. 'One absolutely perfect cultural object' describes perfection as what you can't have and which still motivates the life cultural. A poem deals with William Hallam Pegg, a Nottingham lace designer and communist who, during the Depression, produced a monumental design for an allegory of Want and Plenty, as a pattern to be realised in Jacquard lace.
In central place is the long poem 'Calendar Rite', an autobiographical sequence constructed in a double line like two banks of a river; the poem is strung out along a V where there is a hinge and poems along each arm repeat each other's themes in an altered or defective symmetry. The speaker is faced with a cold river and has to shed every possession to get across it without being swept under. He remembers everything which must be lost, which stored heat and which generated heat. Scenes of unresolved conflict play out in a dream landscape. The rival journeys of several hundred poets are recounted as a race between so many ships, in which almost all are wrecked, their anatomies altered by terminal stresses. Past performances are recalled along with past poems, realised as chains of irrational and compulsive images. Irrational motives for symbolic action are re-voiced as the mineralisation of cherished objects, a personal museum of impassioned seizures which are models for verbal objects, moving from inside to out and surrounding the speaker. The choices infallibly leading to rejection of collective and imposed imagery make for a history of dissidence, symbolised in a tiny 5th century papyrus codex, written at millimetric scale to be easily hidden during police raids, and read with the help of a convex lens. The hidden is boundless and space vanishes into the cracks.
