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Near-Life Experience

Near-Life Experience

SKU:9781800173903

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Strike up music! Scope tomorrow’s printless straits!

I slice the tomatoes, saving their skins – their seeds

freckle the countertop. No ideas but in

No ideas but in things – tell me

about it...



The poems in Near-Life Experience are curious about the present moment, its weather and animals, its objects and things. They want to make it real in language, catching it before it vanishes. Documenting landscapes, paintings, insects and trees, Near-Life Experience offers a world where understanding is subverted by the day’s distractions and the unexpected shapes of the imagination.



How do I relate to this? What does it mean? What’s happening, exactly? Does experience experience me? With descriptive precision and inventiveness, the poet finds humour and panic at the edges of the actual. The poems measure expanding and contracting times, birthdays, seasons, climate breakdown, witnessing the moment and its ‘sheer / ongoing changes’.


About the Author

<p>Rowland Bagnalls poetry first appeared in New Poetries VII (2018). A Few Interiors, his first collection, was published by Carcanet in 2019. His poetry, reviews and essays have appeared in Poetry London, PN Review, The Art Newspaper and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives and works in Oxford.</p><br>

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