... Its flyleaves are thick
with poems: Sophus Claussen, you explain,
those you didn't know by heart and wishing,
one long-ago summer, to travel light,
copied in the space Calvino offered.
Art, sex, a city, a journey: Ken Cockburn's new collection dwells on the connection between people, places, languages and literature. Inspired by inscriptions, graffiti and scribbled notes on the flyleaves of books - Ovid, a guidebook, a superhero comic - these poems interweave travel, home and love, while quietly subverting notions of standing and rank in literature.
Handling both the narrative poem and the haiku with equal skill, Cockburn observes and probes the ways in which we interpret the world with an uncluttered eye.
Fascinating well-wrought contemporary poems... exact and apparently effortless writing. ANGUS REID
It is refreshing to read contemporary poetry of such rare grace and compassion... a welcome contribution to the literature of our nomadic century. TOM HUBBARD, Fife Lines
One of the principal strengths of Cockburn's poetry is its exploration of the life that is contained in seemingly trivial, small or uneventful moments. The result is gentle, meditative poetry that is occasionally opaque but often subtly powerful. ALAN RAWES, Scottish Literary Journal
