Touched

In the initial sequence of this pamphlet, and following short lyrics, the writer explores the experience of living with long-term, and severe mental states. There is no safe haven of medical ‘pathology’ here, but an urgent rite of passage for the damaged and conflicted soul. A form of modern Purgatory—escaping the grasping jaws of Inferno, to find itself stumbling towards a rarefied, yet earthy, Paradiso. Ian Marriott’s marvellous poems inhabit rather than observe nature — in fact they do both — but are as much concerned with the human condition. They work in the area of what Hopkins called instress. The voice is calm, contained and precise, as when he watches a Pond Skater, “So perilous / this thin meniscus — / six legs spread out”. The poems too seem to tremble on the water of their vision. — George Szirtes