Bad Machine

This collection of poems explores the body as the ‘bad machine’. The sudden death of his elderly father and of his younger friend, the poet Michael Murphy, remind the poet how machines – sources of energy and delight in their prime – go so easily wrong; and that change in the body is a signal for moving on. The collection also explores language as a body. Politics, assimilation, desire, creatureliness and the pleasure and loss of the body mingle in various attenuated forms such as lexicon, canzone, acrostics, mirror poems, postcards, and a series of ‘minimenta’ after Anselm Kiefer whose love of history as rubble and monument influence this collection. Its title sequence is a meditation on the love and hatred of knowledge. The Bad Machine was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize.