Interiors and Other Poems
takes the reader down divergent pathways, along the river Stour through the Blackmore Vale weaving threads of identities, history, and the natural world. The poems dive deep into psychic and neurological divergent selves beneath an accrued social, cultural, and environmental history of the area. The personae are both grounded and estranged, living, and breathing as fictive constructs, and drawing upon the earth and its deep ecology. Living things evoke living things.
"
reminds me of Duchamp's
Nude Descending a Staircase
, Jack B Yeats's Dublin scenes, and Braque's
Bottle and Fishes
, but most of all of John Constable's Study for
The Leaping Horse
, in which the palette knife rather than the brush has applied thick layers of pigment so that the eye is arrested by the surface and yet, as with all these examples, a substantial and intimately known terrain is discernible. Beginning with studies of the area round the river Stour which has been Caddy's lifelong habitat, the collection broadens and deepens into the history and changing - but always hierarchical and oppressive - society of the region, and of the wider world refracted through this locality. 'Think global, act local, and perceive and research what is around you, ' might be the book's motto; 'and use all the stylistic means available to convey your results.' As we proceed through the collection the relation between percept and discourse becomes wilder and more adventurous, with shocks caused by the intersection of idioms and genres, and the explosive incursions of the unexpectedly blunt. The closing sequence seems to offer a surrealist case study in psychological and existential dysfunction, which in its own way refracts the tensions of the social and cultural history of the landscape described, brought bang-bang up to date. This book is not a comfortable ride, but it is an endlessly rich and varied experience." -John Freeman