Asylum Nerves

(Paperback)

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Work like this takes no prisoners. One either accedes right away to the energies and images one is confronted with, or one gets left behind. The poems are seldom explicitly contextualised, and he often elects not to invest them with the familiarising cues of emotion. Sometimes only the event, the imaginative journey, is retained - as if to suggest that strangeness is pre-eminent, and affect accidental or secondary. Hammial, moreover, understands that the question of what we should feel about anything is much more difficult than we normally allow (it is one of the discomfiting things about his verse).