Track

Annemarie Austin's vividly imaginative poems explore other worlds and other lives, drawing upon her own memories and experiences, as well as on art, travel, dream, myth, history and literature. Track is her first new collection since her Bloodaxe retrospective Very: New & Selected Poems (2008). There are journeys here. The track may be a railway or a path, and perhaps there's one main route - to the boiler house. There are figures seen on their way and those standing still - the living statue, the woman in camera and the one who's reached the last resort. And creatures too, mourning the death of Pan or trapped in the pound. And behind all these the unreliability of perception, the tension between what can be seen and what cannot, the pressure of space upon the drawn lines, the breakdown of speech in the face of 'the plain gap'.