Suit of Lights

Tom Cunliffe

This is a playful, kaleidoscopic body of work which explores sex, spatial relations and memory with restless formal dynamism. Cunliffe is suspicious of traditional assumptions about the transparency of language and the efficacy of representation. In his world, words provide a means of deconstructing 'patina[s] of myth' and celebrating the lacunary and elusive.

The collection begins with a moving series of tributes to extinct animals, criticising the colonial mentality that equates vision with itemisation and capture and highlighting the sheer strangeness of an empire which fashioned the bones of the Thai Schomburgks Deer into 'spoon handles bound for Sheffield'. Elsewhere in the collection Cunliffe turns away from history, and a dreamlike series of sexual images, divorced from any 'realistic' historical framework, comes to the fore.

But the dissection of habituated assumptions about art sometimes comes at a human price. 'Lago' features an unnamed narrator talking to an anonymous 'you' who is wandering around a fading seaside town. The poem deconstructs the meanings ascribed to 'allocated spaces' but the result is a poignant sense of emptiness, the poem seeming to equate tourism with the lost staggerings of the 'blind' and 'infirm'.

Elsewhere postmodernism seems more fun, and in some ways Cunliffe appears to feel most at home when inhabiting a tangle of sculptural debris. 'This business' stumbles joyously though a dissociated set of images, envying 'the art of putting things down quietly' and evoking the magpie avarice of a recycling sculptor. 'A chair attempts suicide', dealing with a collapsing of nipples, seeds and 'odd bits of plastic', reads like an explosion in a sculptor’s studio, but the final stanza’s talk of 'this body corset' means that the poem can also be read as a corollary of the limitations of the human body.

These are liberating, provocative poems, full of play and evocative of several registers of interpretation.

ISBN 978-1-906309-08-4
£6 plus £4 p&p