Desire and Its Manifestations

Desire in its multifariously limpid and obscure manifestations is one of the salient themes that informs many of the poems in this collection, from the way it is experienced in its recognisably subjective forms as longing, love or intention, to the more challenging notion of its expression as artefact – the objective creations of daily use such as cups, tables, books and money. Consonant with this notion is the way language allies itself with it to make it actual – this book you are holding and its contents being an instance of that – for if our daily artefacts are the echoes of its subterranean making, then surely language as the maker’s first and foremost tool of creative ingenuity, and not just human ingenuity, must be its very flesh.