Dr Zeeman's Catastrophe Machine

Covering the latter half of the 20th Century, the "post war, mod or rocker generation", of which Figura (an occasional mod) was part, it blurs the edges of personal and collective memory to explore family, relationships and belonging against a social, historical and political backdrop. The collection draws its title from the work of mathematician, Christopher Zeeman, who encouraging the application of mathematics to behavioural science. His catastrophe machine was a physical manifestation of Catastrophe Theory, which Konrad Lorenz drew on and extended to apply to human behaviour. Amongst the poems here is a set of "machine poems" - 'Washing Machine', 'The Difference Machine', 'Knitting Machine', and 'Life Support Machine' among them - which act as metaphors for human behaviour and are rich in social and historical context. Other poems extend the themes of both the machine and human motifs. A wife retrieves herself from a controlling husband by reversing the order of words; a man, two years, from retirement is taunted by sparrows playing in a gutter while he does physiotherapy exercises; a mod's handmade brogues symbolise social mobility; a reservoir drains away in the night, its drowned village's occupants stirring back to life at dawn, ... Conjuring up a peculiar social history that carries the reader from the end of World War Two to where we are now, the collection blurs present and past to surprising effect.