Overview

In this collection Angela Gardner explores the many ways of looking. Ripped by a wind that raptures, The Closed Spaces explores the human intertwine of pain and bliss, asking: are we windows or mirrors? How can we hold and restore our attention, resisting the commodification of our gaze? In a society under pressure who gets to look and who is seen? Showcasing a dirty and unequal war, a video game, the mechanics of optics to view a landscape, and the exchange between model and painter each of the poems shows us a different way of being in the body. From the utilitarian hunt of a bird of prey and the helplessness of a political prisoner under the predatory gaze of his captor, to the gaze of a lover finding the attention that Hannah Arendt equated with love.

Full Product Details

9781837380145

Table of Contents

Reviews

""This is very strong and thrilling new work. The ongoing sequences are faultless."" —Cherry Smyth ""'When love disappears / it is replaced by survival' is a devastating truth. And then somehow 'this is not after all a ghazal' is just as devastating, in its weird, perfect way: its knowledge that the poem, as an artifact of experience, is and remains a made thing, but then, so, devastatingly, is the loss of love."" —G.C. Waldrep

Author Information

Welsh-Australian artist and poet Angela Gardner's verse novel The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette was published by Shearsman Books in 2021. Her other recent poetry collections are Some Sketchy Notes on Matter (Recent Work Press, Australia, 2020) and The Told World, also from Shearsman Books in 2014. Among other awards and commissions, she has received a Churchill Fellowship, the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, and Australia Council Residencies and Project funding and a writer-in-residence at the ACT Writers Centre. In 2019 poems were shortlisted for the Aesthetica International Creative Writing Prize and longlisted for the Live Canon International Poetry Prize. 

Tab Content 6

Countries Available