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The world’s / face like a / picture plane. / Its space / offered to the / eye as a / colour might be.
In these poems, everyday occurrences – an imprint in grass, crumbs in a wrapper, the sound of a thermostat engaging – are opportunities for thinking through close attention. Small Theatres is the latest instalment in Mark Truscott’s exploration of our perceptions and feelings of separation from the world around us.
Truscott has mobilized the materiality of language, pushing it into territories of its own failure. These poems find a haunting, opaque song, as they shift theme and method toward time-based disciplines such as music and drama. Small Theatres looks for meaning in an increasingly meaningless world where simultaneous scarcity and excessive availability are products of mechanisms seemingly beyond our grasp. Marshalling minimalist and objectivist techniques and a relentless attention to the fissures running through each thought and every moment of our lives, these poems give shape to a reality constantly on the verge of collapse.
Composed at home in the quiet of early morning, Small Theatres evokes practices of solitude, domesticity, and sober attentiveness to the seemingly insignificant.
“Truscott’s poems contain stillness that, like peering into a meshwork of bunchgrass, teems with subtle life. Densely reflective, keenly framed, and so finely tuned in its music, Small Theatres makes a ‘bower’ for deep attention – a lush, vibrant, ‘leafy shade’ wherein we can shelter and renew despite time’s ‘fickle yet absolute demands.’” Neil Surkan, author of Empties
“Mark Truscott’s Small Theatres is an impressive work of precision amid transformation, making metaphor of the ‘fiction of proximity / that fills the / world with objects / present to the / mind,’ and in so doing manifests John Donne’s seeing in ‘one little room an everywhere.’” Edward Carson, author of twofold