Forgetfulness

Ian Seed is currently RLF Reading Round Fellow in Lancaster. He was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Liverpool, 2023-25, and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chester, 2013-22. He gained a PhD in Italian literature from the University of Lancaster (2012), where he taught Italian literature and translation, as well as creative writing. Before that, he worked in different countries in Europe as an English teacher, technical writer and translator, and international project manager.His first full-length collection of poetry, Anonymous Intruder was published by Shearsman in 2009. Since then, Shearsman have published Shifting Registers (2011), Makers of Empty Dreams (2014), Identity Papers (2016), New York Hotel (2018), selected by Mark Ford as a TLS Book of the Year, The Underground Cabaret (2020), and Night Window (2024). His latest collection is Forgetfulness (2026).Seed's translations include The Dice Cup (Wakefield Press, US, 2023), from the French of Max Jacob, The River Which Sleep Has Told Me (Fortnightly Review Odd Volumes, 2022), from the Italian of Ivano Fermini, Bitter Grass (Shearsman, 2020), from the Italian of Gezim Hajdari, and The Thief of Talant (Wakefield Press, US, 2016), the first translation into English of Pierre Reverdy's Le voleur de Talan (1917).

"Ian Seed's Forgetfulness is broken open both more formally and emotionally than his other books to date, with room for intimate, if seemingly casual, Joe Brainard-like rememberings of the newly or long since passed, interspersed with dream-like lyrics and the more familiar (with sly defamiliarisation around every bend) prose poems. Throughout, there's the perhaps ultimately hopeful acknowledgement of the extent to which we know nothing; the uncertainty of all our stories 'where we lose / ourselves in the spaces as they appear / slipping through our fingers, open and bright'."-Jeremy Over"Ian Seed allows us to 'stay inside the asking', inside a dream half-dreamt, a loss mid-grieved. His elegies expand like half-lit corridors, leading to new selves - or old selves we have forgotten, their 'cigarettes glowing in the oncoming evening'.''-Caroline Bird