Kirjahaku

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The poems and prose poems in Anonymous Intruder navigate the vulnerabilities revealed in relationships, only to abandon these in a wandering search for new encounters and new truths. The seeking 'self' goes into exile to be shattered and reconstructed. In a hesitant movement towards the transcendental, the poems consider the possibility and impossibility of returning home. They must first find a way to recognise the stranger approaching from a distance. Although these narratives are fragmented and elliptical, the imagery is stark and clear, the language concise, the rhythms and patterns engaging.

With a fragmented yet rich lyricism, 'Shifting Registers' crosses borders between lost and rediscovered identity. The voices in the poems may be tentative and vulnerable, regretful and haunting, or playful and provocative, as they relive and re-imagine half-remembered journeys and encounters. That which has become strange through its distance in the past becomes once again familiar, while that which is near in the present begins to be unknowable. Shifting Registers seeks to reconcile the two, and to construct a wholeness for the future, yet without resort to easy answers or false resolution. Throughout, there is delight in the navigation of different realities and new spaces through language.

With a sparse, haunting, often playful lyricism, the makers of empty dreams emerge like figures in the reels of an old, almost abandoned film. Their stories, often set in different countries which we may or may not know, tell of loss and estrangement, of betrayal and reconciliation, and of a search for the possibilities of renewal along the way.

The prose poems in Identity Papers seek to construct a living bridge between the self and its shadow, between the self and other, and between present and past. They do so with a vulnerable faith, working with Heidegger's dictum that all things must be allowed their time in darkness. Along the way, their narrators meet a series of disturbing, irresistible strangers. Identity Papers follows on from Makers of Empty Dreams (Shearsman, 2014). It is the second volume in a trilogy of prose poem collections.

`The delight of Ian Seed's brilliantly droll poems is that they are not entirely droll. They look and sound normal, like brief prose anecdotes told in a bar but the apparent normality is edged with disorientation, menace and anxiety. We slip over the edge in an instant and look to recover our balance but can't quite. The world has gone, leaving behind a comical void. And that, we understand, is the nature of the world. The voice is controlled, in fact it's perfect. It's just that nothing else is.' -George Szirtes

The prose poems in The Underground Cabaret form the final volume of a quartet, following on from New York Hotel, Identity Papers and Makers of Empty Dreams. "In The Underground Cabaret, Ian Seed is at his unsettling and uncanny best. In each of these tightly constructed pieces, Seed gives us people who are helpless in the face of absurdity, who miss each other or form only transient connections and who suffer alienation and loneliness in eerie and surreal encounters which emerge out of the seemingly ordinary and mundane. 'Just when I thought I'd turned everything inside out,' says one character; just when we think Seed has turned the world upside down as far as it will go, he turns it further, holds it tighter." -Andrew McMillan "The real and the uncanny turn on a sixpence in The Underground Cabaret. If Raymond Carver and Jacques Tati had collaborated, it would be here. In bars, offices, bedrooms, cafes, trains, fields, and many other likely and unlikely places, Ian Seed pulls daily reality taut, twists it with expertise and distils it down to its finest surreality, navigating what it means to be human, everywhere, nowhere and at any given moment." -Jane Monson. 'Seed's micro-narratives and oblique parables are at once droll and haunting, as unpredictable as quicksand, and as elegant as the work of those masters of the prose poem, Max Jacob and Pierre Reverdy.' -Mark Ford, on New York Hotel, in the Times Literary Supplement,

"I go to Ian Seed's poetry whenever I need reminding of the possibilities or a good slap in the inspiration. A master of the prose poem and the unexpected lyric. There's a beautiful, painterly logic to these compositions and a perfect balance between the elevating magical and the crushingly disappointing. His narrators speak for all of us, at work, in transit, in family, memory, or continental cities. Grief-stricken, erotic, silly, embarrassed or baffled, but somehow determined to live 'joyously and seriously' against the inexplicable, the obligatory and the mundane at whatever damn cost. Night Window is shot through with melancholy, wit, absences and bookshops - it deserves legions of readers." -Luke Kennard "Exquisitely voiced and deeply beguiling, Night Window explores impermanence in uncanny, liminal and provocative poems. Often set in the transitory spaces of trains, buses, cafes, markets and trattorie, narrators confront their nostalgia and self-imposed exile in a series of threshold moments foregrounding 'obsession', 'unspeakable desire', erotic remembrance and quotidian encounters. The motif of fenestration heightens the fusion between neo-Gothic outsiderness and modernity's transcendent flaneurism in poems which are often mordantly humorous and sardonic. In self-reflexive, Calvino-esque moments, Seed reveals, 'I have to find a way / to free the text to yield its story' and reminds us, 'It takes a stranger to see the beauty'. Gertrude Stein once said Max Jacob had a 'poet soul'. A translator of Jacob's poetry, Ian Seed in Night Window, uncovers his own poet's soul and cements his reputation as one of the finest contemporary proponents of the prose poem form." -Cassandra Atherton

In its tragicomic navigation of different forms of loss, Forgetfulness moves from the allegorical to the abstract lyric, through to the surreal-absurd, and finally to a series of splintered memories. It is a collection which seeks to re-construct and re-inhabit the past through the truths of imagination and fiction, as well as the storytelling of remembrance. Throughout these pages, the end is uncertain, forever in the making, and only possibly true.