(This first appeared in Under the Radar issue 9.)
Whilst I watch the clouds come along on fronts, I can’t decide whether to say that emotion lives on the edge of thought or that thought lives on the edge of emotion, but either way all poetry is closely involved with this problem. The three pamphlets which I have been reading contain poems that it is interesting to think of as responses, whether their speakers are responding to a book, the sight of their lover with someone else, or the death of a cloned ibex. How we in turn then respond is perhaps too complicated, but it is enough to say that we as readers are closely attuned to these responses, as we are, in some way, taking part in the same action, feeling the same pressures of thought and emotion. To dramatise and direct these pressures is no easy business, and it is interesting to see how Caleb Klaces, Kirsten Irving and Adrian Buckner, in their different ways, attempt it.