Fidelities - Ian Seed

"Ian Seed says of Fidelities, ‘The poems here range from the lyrical to the more experimental, but I think that they all probe and explore a series of encounters and journeys.  I see them as being faithful, “in their fashion”, to the truths they discover along the way’. This collection enacts an excursive articulation of the world and language, the shifts and creative repetitions found in both, between words and inside words, between moments and within moments: each poem finding its distinct poetic imperative to reveal these moves in the landscape in complex and subtle ways. The rhythms of these poetic journeys involve but also exceed the sonic; here is the shaping of the space and time of attention, a focus and intimacy that situates and then opens up, and into, our embodied encounters with the phenomenal world; here is presence, and reflection on presence and on being present. This is language as an eye that sees and a hand that touches and shapes, but also as ‘skin listening’. ‘We do not see from our bodies as from inside /a box. We pertain to the whole, we take our place /in the landscape, in the touching of the sleek and rough.'” Patricia Farrell