Blotter

From the winner of the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize and the 2013 Eric Gregory Award comes an inventive and experimental new collection which responds in new ways to the language of the internet. The poems in Blotter are preoccupied with the passage of time, and the different ways that passage can be registered and made unstable; the distorted seasons, the timestamp of a text message, the jottings of a daybook, the formal structure of a shepherd’s calendar, the double exposure of a photograph, the reverse-flow of a twitter feed. The title responds to all these concerns: it is a police blotter, a diary, a tab of acid, and, in its painterly connotation, a way of rendering the world in a manner that is vague, blurred, and out of focus. The book is made up of five distinct sequences, each made using a different process including haikus, sonnets and prose, In all of these sequences, images of their self are not projected outward into the world, but made visible through the way the poems respond to and organise external material. They are poems which discover their subjects as they develop, negotiate between different voices, and try to be alert to the trivial, the funny and the merely interesting.