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blink / and the outline is lost
As a said place gathers together poems written since Keepsache (2011). The book is shaped around 'I'm on the Train', a sequence prompted by and on a repeated train journey from home to work through parts of Devon and Cornwall. It returns to the spirit of John Hall's early book, Days. In each case the poems arise from the contingencies of the everyday and respond to the language demands that these seem to make. Before and after this sequence are clusters of individual poems, including the title poem, a fragmentary meditation suggested by reading the philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. All the poems share a sense that poetry, among its other qualities, is also a mode - or a set of modes - of thinking: the saying of the world continues to matter, as does its unsaying, and that this by no means brings ease: the broken lines that constitute poetry negotiate ambivalent relations with the continuities of speech, with syntax, with the carefulness of thought.
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John Hall is the author of several books of poetry, of one novella, of visual poems, and of essays on poetry, poetics and performance writing. Shearsman has previously published Couldn't You? (2007), a collection of poems, and two volumes of his essays. Two selections of his poems have been published by Etruscan Books. He is also a recently retired teacher, who worked for most of his career at the now much lamented Dartington College of Arts where, among many other things, he steered in an approach to the teaching of writing under the name, Performance Writing.
