There was a balloon in the shape of a city.
There was a cloud in the shape of a carpet.
Seasons spun across the sky amid bits of songs.
But what was the point of that impetuousness?
Beauty is too easy, and is dwarfed by the wistfulness
that follows its inevitable disappearance.


from 'Obscurities'
          

Every poet is a fool in refusing to give up the quest for an account of the world based on truth and beauty. Patrick Mackie's debut collection explores the poet's foolish-ness in forms which are ludic, wry, at times conversational and always beguiling and unique. It is as though Schumann's Carnival had been translated into words, and Harlequin holds most, but not all, of the trump cards.

There are love poems, meditations, narrative snapshots, real and imagined landscapes, and encounters with a range of figures and forces, from Paul Klee to the Devil. Patrick Mackie acknowledges his debts to Wallace Stevens, to French Surrealism and to Goethe, amongst others, but such debts do not obscure the
emergence of a unique poetic talent, tensely rhapsodic, that is pitched between
lyricism, Modernism and the comic.