Ruby Street

Writing comes from the body, out of the senses and rhythms of the body. The interstitial and the uncertainty in immanence is part of that process. Sense data arrives on moments. Bodily syntax isn’t smooth. The body has its digressions that the thinking body theorises. Memory is made up of fragment and trace. A heart has its arrhythmias. As do words, so hard consonants disrupt mellifluous vowels. Thus, a rhythm. For instance, whenever my writing starts en plein air, so to speak, I am not just employing an observational mode. And when I make poems with a broken or collaged narrative, that can emerge from acts of walking, changing trains, changing travel modes, the coming and going of bodies, voices, weathers. It is a continuing exploration of language and location. Fracture and discontinuity are real experiences of energy and movement. Poems are made with the materials of this world, its languages, its scratchings and surfaces, its keys and screens, as well as the poet’s body and lif...

My next book, now it’s public, will be called Brink (unless there is a last-minute title change, always possible in publishing). Now that it’s more or less settled, I am of course working on writing ideas beyond that – ideas that are more than a poem here and there. Needless to say, this includes a ‘next next’ book, the one after this next book, as an idea.   I realise, of course, that in poetry publishing there’s never a ‘next book’ until it’s signed, sealed and delivered, but the idea of ‘next’ is a focus for activity, as well as a goad, and a reminder that there may be a place for a few things to land together. It may never happen, I may not make it (that gets more clear as you get older), and the-world-as-I-know-it may not make it (that’s pretty clear right now), but you never know your luck. Brink , I suspect, will be seen as broadly ‘ecopoetic’ (more on that soon) – anyway, I’ll bet at least one review (should I get any reviews but, hey, you never know your luck) will me...

My body fills with arguments each day, sometimes they are about yellow borders the blaze along the bone. There’s a bomb in my brain an irregular tick inside my breast an ambiguity in each step requiring more words newly repeated that do not think themselves into place. I am my own discourse and am never alone.