So Many Moving Parts

This collection experiments with the limits of the lyric form, especially as it is taught in the context of academic creative writing. Poems open from an apparently stable voice or observation towards an effect of provisionality and ambivalence. Their innovation is at the level of technique rather than content: they use deliberately ‘contrary’ strategies to upset and offset the smoothness and ‘good behaviour’ of the lyric voice, as if challenging Ezra Pound’s famous modernist dictum of ‘Don’ts’ by introducing, for example, a flatfooted or adjectival line, or rhetorical question, or mixture of abstraction and the concrete, or elaborate patterning into an otherwise ‘well-behaved’ and naturalistic lyric.