This first full-length volume draws from poems written over roughly ten years: prose sequences, sonnets or thereabouts, parody-homages, a metro poem, psychical collaborations, and drawn from small-print chapbooks. Combining a condensed lyricism, collage, and durational procedures, the collection works its way through days and the everyday (near accidents, a working salad, the assumptions of architecture)...
The sense of fleeting glimpse, of provisionality, of actual sense-data taken in but not yet possessed, is terrific. Is it 'lyric'? Well, yes--but with a stylistic affiliation to Projective and subsequent aesthetics. And no--in the sense that Wright does not seek that laurel or that identification.
The feeling given is of a spacey self-awareness. So many lines in these poems seem acts of orientation, verification of the subject's placement, vis-a-vis sounds, views, examinations--of the sky, of overhead wires, a bird, sounds of a nearby train or traffic, changes in the weather. A space both actual and mental.
Ken Bolton,
Southerly
Tim Wright is the author of
The night's live changes
(2014) and
Weekend's end
(2013).