Kirjahaku

The world’s / face like a / picture plane. / Its space / offered to the / eye as a / colour might be. In these poems, everyday occurrences – an imprint in grass, crumbs in a wrapper, the sound of a thermostat engaging – are opportunities for thinking through close attention. Small Theatres is the latest instalment in Mark Truscott’s exploration of our perceptions and feelings of separation from the world around us. Previously, Truscott mobilized the materiality of language, pushing it into territories of its own failure. Now his poems find a haunting, opaque song, as they shift theme and method toward time-based disciplines such as music and drama. Small Theatres looks for meaning in an increasingly meaningless world where simultaneous scarcity and excessive availability are products of mechanisms seemingly beyond our grasp. Marshalling minimalist and objectivist techniques and a relentless attention to the fissures running through each thought and every moment of our lives, these poems give shape to a reality constantly on the verge of collapse. Composed at home in the quiet of early morning, Small Theatres evokes practices of solitude, domesticity, and sober attentiveness to the seemingly insignificant.

Warning: this book may encourage a series of ungrammatical thoughts! Welcome to the poetic landscape of Mark Truscott, where less is more than you bargained for. Said Like Reeds or Things is a book of micropoetic and linguistic koans. With a quirky, off-centre sense of humour, these poems uncover a language that has malfunctioned only to find itself in the form of a gesture. Minimalist in form, these small gatherings of words, a.k.a. 'poems', seek strangeness in familiar language; their effect is harmonic dissonance within the mind -- like an overturned toy box in your path to the television set, these poems are a fresh and amusing diversion from the everyday from which they are derived. Mysteriously entertaining and precise, these succinct, visual lyrics say as much about the world as they do about their own status as objects for reading, and they persist in the hilarity and contemplation of their own enigmatic possibilities. 'Mark Truscott's Said Like Reeds or Things is the work of a mischievous conservationist with a shadow of Basho in the mix. It's sometimes snappy, sometimes calm, and always an exhilarating tease. This is the place where little pieces of perfection ride along a sublime horizon line.' -- Lisa Jarnot