The Animal Subsides

Here are modernistic yet approachable poems, rich with allusions and word-play, and suffused with a sort of angry tenderness.

"David Bircumshaw's The Animal Subsides takes language, the solar system, the family, and considers their reduction to the minimum. This minimum is eager and wants to create new things all the time. It has forgotten how to make the old things. The key image is dust and the lighting is a kind of primordial glow in which origins and originating processes are visible.

"Bircumshaw's new poetry exits the conventions of the modern English scene to open its own volume, stabilised by the thrust of its own energies."

ANDREW DUNCAN