Open Workings

Iain Bamforth's third collection applies carnival licence to various kinds of histories: personal; symbolic; ethnographic; social - even to a history of representations in the 101 epigrams and "autographemes" which make up the Paris sequence "Impediments". Away from the city, the series of narratives of patients based on his experience as a country doctor in the south west of Scotland, and the harsher poems set in a mining town in the Australian outback contribute to a social history of their communities as they examine how a rural doctor can negotiate against the sheer weight of common sense.