Touched

In the initial sequence of this pamphlet, and following short lyrics, the writer explores the experience of living with long-term, and severe mental states. There is no safe haven of medical pathology here, but an urgent rite of passage for the damaged and conflicted soul. A form of modern Purgatoryescaping the grasping jaws of Inferno, to find itself stumbling towards a rarefied, yet earthy, Paradiso. Ian Marriotts marvellous poems inhabit rather than observe nature in fact they do both but are as much concerned with the human condition. They work in the area of what Hopkins called instress. The voice is calm, contained and precise, as when he watches a Pond Skater, So perilous / this thin meniscus / six legs spread out. The poems too seem to tremble on the water of their vision. George Szirtes