Kirjahaku

Implicit in ingredients are the stories of matter itself: without food there can be no other stories. Like the poems of Bee Journal these poems started life in notebooks, in situ.

Bee Journal is a poem-journal of beekeeping that chronicles the life of the hive. Because of its genesis as a working journal, there is here an unusual intimacy and scrutiny of life and death in nature.

The poems of Inmates stage encounters with insects at sites and moments of their refuge, torpor, hatching or fighting, of traversing a floor in the night or climbing a wall, of their death and decay – all in and around the house of the writer, with whom they are sharing time, as fellow inmates. There is an urgency to these poems, emerging from the instant of their writing, and the close attention Borodale brings to his observation of the natural world results in poems of real intensity. Inmates is an attempt to co-exist with the natural world – examining it, intimately, at the edge of language itself, where the human voice begins to break apart.

Traversing the broken, collapsed, eroded stones, looking for voices that express the damaged and the damned, Asylum pays homage to the darkness of the human cave: its memories and ancient histories, and to its more contemporary signals - internationally owned quarries, abandoned coal mines, decommissioned Cold War bunkers.