Kirjahaku

Some Sketchy Notes on Matter came together slowly around preoccupations of safety and shelter at an individual, societal and global level. I also wanted to look at the tensions between digital and analogue reality, between the city and a natural world that exists without us, strange, compelling and precarious. At its worst these tensions become an imbalance, a violence, threatening not only the individual body but the entire planet.

"Views of the Hudson", written during a visit to New York in 2008, explores ideas of belonging and displacement. In a flood of images from this overcrowded information-rich city it weaves a narrative that suggests both the intoxication and dangers of believing in Promised Lands. "Views of the Hudson" shows the life of a city that is complicated and enriched for being at once both sacred and profane.

"With this fine collection Gardner's work achieves what one poem describes as 'beauty itself / taut against the half-life rendering.' Human experience is the shadow cast by these poems, and not the other way around. 'A wholeness ghost-licked or absent / gets caught in the machinery,' Gardner observes, and yet these fearlessly unhaunted poems serve to backlight the ghosts that gather at their edges, that any reader brings to bear upon these stanzas' precise attentions." - G.C. Waldrep

The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette tells the tale of the author's great-grandmother's cousin, Richard Parker, a cabin-boy on a yacht being sailed from Southampton to Sydney in 1884 for Jack Want a prominent New South Wales barrister and politician. The Mignonette foundered in the South Atlantic far from land, and after nineteen days with no sight of any other vessel to rescue them, and with all four in a terrible state, the captain and mate decided to murder and eat poor Richard. Days later the remaining sailors were rescued and returned to Falmouth to face justice. The original trial at Exeter Assize was moved to The Old Bailey due to huge public interest and the need to clarify the Empire's maritime legal framework regarding what had been common practice. The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette takes place in the West Country, at sea and in Australia. It explores power relationships, individual motives, survivor guilt and self-justification, and justice and divine retribution. Poetry heightens the tension and drives the narrative telling the personal and human story of one of the most important legal judgements in English Law-that necessity is not a defence for murder-and is still taught at Universities The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette tells the tale of the author's great-grandmother's cousin, Richard Parker, a cabin-boy on a yacht being sailed from Southampton to Sydney in 1884 for Jack Want a prominent New South Wales barrister and politician. The Mignonette foundered in the South Atlantic far from land, and after nineteen days with no sight of any other vessel to rescue them, and with all four in a terrible state, the captain and mate decided to murder and eat poor Richard. Days later the remaining sailors were rescued and returned to Falmouth to face justice. The original trial at Exeter Assize was moved to The Old Bailey due to huge public interest and the need to clarify the Empire's maritime legal framework regarding what had been common practice. The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette takes place in the West Country, at sea and in Australia. It explores power relationships, individual motives, survivor guilt and self-justification, and justice and divine retribution. Poetry heightens the tension and drives the narrative telling the personal and human story of one of the most important legal judgements in English Law-that necessity is not a defence for murder-and is still taught at Universities globally.

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.