I was asked to write an introduction to this book, which is good,
because I enjoy writing, this thing I do now, right now, and now. This
collection contains, interspersed, a tenuous poetics against realism.
But this is odd, as many of the poems which parenthesise these sections
are based in the very real realities of the last two years of life on
earth. Based, but it befits me to further warp these realities,
tumescing them with imagined people and places, imagined words and
imagined psychologies. Parentheses are funny things, like the trees who
parenthesise this bench, and the auld fella smoking on the bench, and,
who knows, all the dust etcetera and the pigeon feathers and the
infinite static, parentheses parenthesised themselves by two bus stops,
one for this way and one for the other, thus the universe is strapped to
a rack and stretched in opposite directions. But the poems in this book
are not really real parentheses. They look like this: (. . .). . .). .
.) and each piece is much more of an in than 'a putting in beside'. They
are not postrealist (a cumbersome word most commonly used in the sphere
of international relations) poems, but they are, in a sense,
superpositions, existing in multiple states simultaneously; real and
imagined, past/present/future, on a building site on a lay-by in the
British Museum. But how can there be postrealism when there was no
realism to begin with? Just as we can knock our knuckles on the table
and feel the wood resist our bones, yet still be ignorant as to what the
wood and the bones and the flesh and the air in between are actually
made of, we can, concurrently, watch the news and hear the politicians
bloviate on 'the reality of the situation', and know that the reality
they speak of is infested with bugs and subject to sudden and
unthinkable changes. But here we are, we are here, watching the news and
smashing our fists against the table, just waiting for our hands to
dissolve through empty space. And here I am, finally, on the 82 to
Speke. Branches scrape the windows of the second deck. One of those days
where you walk past Woolton Carpet Centre and think to yourself, Why not
have a look around? And I did, and it was beautiful.
