Tonight, the moon is a voice
disguising a language
you once found familiar

and your hands have that strange
look words sometimes get
when looked at too long.

    from 'The shed'

A Lens in the Palm speaks from a world of fragmented philosophies and troubled meditations. Haunted by the ghosts of Keats and Spinoza, of Rodin and Turner, the voices that echo through these poems lead us into a place that is at once familiar and dazzlingly strange. Poems materialise from a palimpsest of twenty-first-century cities 'Paris and New Orleans, Oxford, Milan' where declarations of faith and disbelief clash and blur. Here, the stars 'think themselves into existence', the bones of Giotto jangle, and the 'hairs on a dandelion fizz'.


Cover image Shosan, Monkey reaching for the moon, Japanese woodcut c. 1910. Cover design www.StephenRaw.com.

Contents


The lens 11
Moons 12
The Consolation of Philosophy 13
Ghosting 14
The stars 15
Conversions: the ruined statue of a saint 16
Furcula 17
The frequency 18
There 19
The recipe 20
The line 21
Gumbo 22
What the ceiling said 23
Mincing words 24
Of thought – the train 25
Midas 26
Rodin’s Balzac 27
The ancient of days 28
Hierakonpolis 29
Extraction 30
The ledger 31
Not amnesia 32
‘Nor even yet quite relinquish –’ 33
The shed 34
Tens and eight 35
Via negativa 36
Between stations 37
Les Parapluies 38
Rain, Steam, andSpeed 39
The easel of Mantegna 40
A spider in Trinity College chapel 41
Reflections on a steel teapot 42
In the National Library of Ireland 43
The triple tree 44
Metaphysics 45
The six fifteen 46
Camping out 47
Spinnings 48
Strange currencies 49
Shutters 50
The ghost grove 51
Tractatus 52
The things of snow 53
Working some things through 54
The metal clasp 55
The night is like a dinosaur 56
Giotto 57
April morning 58
Flickering out 59
A suite of bats 60
Landscape with coffee and wings 64
Philosophy of language 65
Sight, unseen 66
Lacewing 67
Palms 68