Root

This is a collection in search of origins, a kind of 'delving', 'trying to get to the bottom of it'. In a series of unsettling prose poems Black offers pieces of a fractured past. The effect is memorable and often menacing, each poem glinting like a sliver from a broken mirror; language enacting the struggle to retrieve and reassemble an unauthorised past. The difficulties of truth finding and telling are explored through shifts in identity and a syntax of qualifications and hesitations where everyday phrases take on a new and frightening resonance. Domestic objects and rituals loom large in the distorted reflections of the poems, conveying a sense of wonderland gone wrong.