Poetry

wakefield press / friendly street poets 

ISBN 978 1 74305 099 6 / march 2012

urban biology is Ian’s first full collection of poetry. The poems employ diverse voices: various animals, historical figures, scientists, visitors from elsewhere. They vary in form from barely heard phrases to complex longer works with inter-linked sequences with multiple points of view. The work is informed by science that rigorous, rational and mechanistic. Yet the poems are suffused with wonder and respect, as they explore the limits of language to describe our environment and our emotional responses to it.

Here are a couple of sample poems:

Lullabies, Gardens Road Cemetery

Through the stillness you invoke when the traffic goes quiet,
when the wind falls calm and leaves quiver but do not drop,
you may convince yourself: “Yes, I can hear them.” Perhaps

flowers might have been folded from tissue paper or Chinese silk;
a plaque might once have been a ploughshare, perhaps only one
breath, only one name, unaccompanied, only “Tom”, unadorned.

Yes, perhaps you can hear them: hushed below widow-maker gums,
buttressed figs, under tussocks, dandelions, iron wrought by sadness,
these wistful strains, the lullabies of the barely born, a mother’s song,

after Father, … Click here for more.

The starting point for much of Ian’s poetry is that language fails us all too often: the feelings and experiences we cannot put into words; half-remembered details of events in our past or imagined in our future; missed fragments of conversations… So how can we portray, reproduce, explain these failings using only the language we have?

The poetry covers many styles. It often consists of inter-linked sequences with multiple points of view. The language itself may be vernacular, or archaic, based on latin and old english roots, or it may have technical elements, derived from the world of science. Ian regularly uses sampling and translational techniques to generate new texts from found sources.

Much of Ian’s writing has been project-based, often in collaboration with other artists, resulting in sequences of poems, images, audio and video with specific style and content suited to the project.

Ian’s work has been widely published in-print and on-line. Several poems have been short-listed for major prizes. To date, he has produced three full books of poems: urban biology (2012); The Microscope Project: How Things Work (with Catherine Truman and Deb Jones, 2014); and Floribunda (with Judy Morris, 2015). Each of these books has an … Click here for more.