Description
Book SynopsisTripping Over Clouds issues a bold challenge to Ezra Pound’s maxim to `go in fear of abstractions’. Underpinning this is a re-imagining of abstraction as a prior state of possibility and potential from which the world and ourselves are constantly re-emerging – as abstraction to, not from. Both philosophical and fresh, the poetry trips off and back onto the page, like the fellrunner in its opening section: `to talk about / the pleasure principle / of falling downhill fastly’. Lucy Burnett’s second collection explores how we fetch up with the world in all its variety, difficulty and beauty, ranging across encounters with mountains, love, contemporary politics and visual art. Ultimately this is a poetry which asserts hope, and playfulness, as strategies for navigating an inherently changeable sense of now.
Trade Review`There is something of Dylan Thomas in the exuberant wordplay and feeling for place, and something of W.S. Graham in her exploration of language and landscape as the twin territories within which we live... Burnett’s subjects are serious ones, but her poems are joyful to read, revelling in the endless possibilities of language and of the world itself, “in whatever colour you might come”.’ - Helen Tookey; `Lucy Burnett’s poems involve us in a vivid experience of the self in landscape and language, moving playfully but with an intensity that at times leaves us breathless and amazed.’ - Grevel Lindop
