Saving Spaces

Ian Pople's poems are shaped and tested by a crystalline sense of silence that makes his words sing out from the page like bird song. Each poem listens to itself unfold, feeling its way through its song in developments that are at once natural and astonishing. He is both an ecstatic observer of the natural world and a whole-hearted and honest participant in human relationships and the human condition. It is the way his poems move that make them so refreshing, the way they spill the reader through lines full of astonishing detail, alternating between moments of uncertainty and illumination. "Shaking up our sense of England and England's poetry in the twenty-first century, Pople avoids the highways (and the many byways) of his contemporaries, making his own desire path, 'saving space' - His poems and sequences have a chancy magic in their juxtapositions. They deal seriously with love and faith, but are opportunistic and wittily anarchic as they say: 'If you have that expression / in your mouth, I'll use it too.' " John Mcauliffe