The Ship's Eye

Setting out from the South Downs, The Ship's Eye invites us to a reverential pause with its compact language and imagistic force. These poems chart a path through the elusive forests of memory, like the faun which in the opening piece "hovers in the arch of trees" before darting into the undergrowth. This publication locates acute, original translations from The Odyssey alongside works of personal memory. The links between these disparate fields are forged with an aesthetic awareness which is classicist in the finest sense of the word: out of near silence, fugitive details resolve into emotional archetypes whose place is both within and beyond the limitations of everyday time. In this way we rediscover the fleeting movements and transactions which make up daily life, from the beggar found out as a returning hero, to the "rhythmic click" of knitting needles which sum up a child's relationship to her parents.