Location: "Drought." New Writing 14 (London: Granta, 2006): 146. ISBN 1862078505 AND "Fin de Siécle." Poetry Review 93.2 (2003): 12. ISSN 00322156 AND "The Taboo." Poetry Review 93.3 (2003): 15. ISSN 00322156 AND "Vermilion." The Liberal VII (February/March 2006): 17. ISSN 17448573 AND "Collecting the Ridges." The Liberal VIII (July/August 2006): 19. ISSN 17448573
The work is a selection of five prose poems. Its originality consists in the use of prose poem as allegory, as opposed to the tradition of prose poetry's interest in the surreal and the humorous. This is significant because, where heretofore in Britain the form was primarily practised by post avant or experimental poets such as David Miller and Denise Riley, mainstream poets such as Simon Armitage and Lavinia Greenlaw, among numerous others, have increasingly employed and published prose poems. My objective was to attempt an unusual, original, and difficult enterprise, the use of allegory in the prose poem. The poems present a literal situation whose ambiguities simultaneously indicate the presence of a broader perspective through figuration.