A post on John Godfrey's 'Soothe' was scheduled for this morning. However, with typical perversity, I find myself lying on the bed surrounded by copies of Kit Robinson's poems. Ron S's post is to blame.

What is it about reading - how a year or so ago these poems just didn't gel for me & now I'm greedy for more?

This volume - The Champagne of Concrete - is packed with good things. I love the 'open field' style poems such as 'Lip Service' and the prose sequence entitled 'Rushes The Sun Parts Daily'. The feel is of the notebook, the daily journal, citations from office e-mails, snatches of talk in the coffee room (I notice "sips" is a recurrent word), the jibberish of managerial talk. Yet it's what he does with it all that astonishes.

And I really like these paragraphs from the Afterword* to The Crave volume:

"It might be possible to explicate every such detail, if only memory served, but it wouldn't do any good, because the meaning of these poems does not lie in any specific referents, but in the relational spaces between and among them.

Against the specificities of a place, a kind of metaphysical fascination seizes the objects of thought and feeling, separates them and sets them down on the page in the form of words. The pleasure of this act of placement, for me, is unlike any other. It makes of itself a place, to return to, paradoxically, as if for the first time."

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* Incidentally, where Robinson explains 'Line 56' mentioned in Ron's post