Question to the Creatures

Question to the Creatures interrogates confinement and faith, darkness and light, speech, memory and translation. It takes bearings from the work of the Spanish mystic John of the Cross, whose dark night of the soul surrounds the poet-translator in the small hours of new motherhood. When light does break into the darkness, it’s ambiguous: the intoxicating, trickster LEDs that muddle the navigation systems of moths; the ‘standby lights’ of a taxidermist’s eyes; the orange glow of wildfires encroaching on the places of memory. Things are unearthed, turned to the flickering light, and reckoned with: the teeming world of microbial life (‘a million citizen animalcules on hustling commute / illegible to the eye’s bare bulb’), creaturely consciousness, and our responsibility towards those we love, those we lose, and those we never come to meet. Above all, these poems attend to unknowing – Keats’s negative capability, or the ‘hiddenness’ of the mystics – that prefers questions over answers. Full of curiosity, attention and doubt, illuminated by moonlight, torchlight, candle-glow and blazing fire, Question to the Creatures is a formidable second collection.