Colours Nailed to the Mast: A Book of Ingredients

Colours Nailed to the Mast is not so much a memoir as an immemoir, fretting at traces, gaps and losses that start to expose absence as the productive heart of my poetic life; for with poetry I have needed to fill in the absence, not by attempted retrievals as in some of these essays, but by linguistic analogues that aspire to life, golems if you like. The unexpected absence of the final step. At best the poems emerge from my immemory into independence, even if their familial resemblance may...