The poems in Near-Life Experience are curious about the present moment, its weather and animals, its objects and things. They want to make it real in language, catching it before it vanishes. Documenting landscapes, paintings, insects and trees, Near-Life Experience offers a world where understanding is subverted by the day's distractions and the unexpected shapes of the imagination. How do I relate to this? What does it mean? What's happening, exactly? Does experience experience me? With descriptive precision and inventiveness, the poet finds humour and panic at the edges of the actual. The poems measure expanding and contracting times, birthdays, seasons, climate breakdown, witnessing the moment and its 'sheer / ongoing changes'.

About the Author
Rowland Bagnall's first collection, A Few Interiors, was published by Carcanet in 2019. His poetry, reviews and essays have appeared in Poetry London, PN Review, The Art Newspaper and elsewhere. He lives and works in Oxford.

Reviews
'Rowland Bagnall shows us that a poet can also be an architect, film director and cubist painter; his poetics shine an astonishing light onto questions concerning time and space.' - Isabel Galleymore;'The poems in Near-Life Experience are so fully and intensely realised that to enter the collection feels like entering a living landscape.' - Caleb Klaces;'There is so much pleasure in this collection, and so little anxiety.' - Laura Scott



Book Information
ISBN 9781800173903
Author Rowland Bagnall
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd