Paperweight

by Claire Gaskin

In her second major collection, Claire Gaskin dismantles language to explore the emotional and intellectual integrity of experience and liberates the power of imagery in moments of pure surprise.

Spare yet expressive, playful yet wise, Paperweight celebrates the visceral power of poetry and its connection to the body, personal history, and the emergence of the unconscious in us all.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was refreshing to dip into this fine collection of poems, thoughtful, probing,tentative juxtaposing the deeply personal perspective of the mind’s eye with the every day, the philosophical and intellectual, with vivid and surreal dreamscapes, keen observations of the natural world, love, longing and loss, sex and death and so much more.

[Initially NO · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the combination of simplicity and complexity in these poems. The line spacings made meaning, like the rest-beat/bar, in a song. The line spacing, is the only punctuation – no stops or commas in these poems, no capitalisation either – just spare words.
Loved the many unique captivating turns of phrase in Claire Gaskin’s poems:
‘people want to touch an image of naked suffering
because it cancels out their own
knife scrapping out the last contents of the jar’ (p42, 'to construct is to omit).

This book is all serious, and, is comfortable with being so. I enjoyed that and the eerie feeling of edge and depth that it had. That seriousness made me wonder, what it is about a poet that has either all their life been able to speak directly about what they sense, or has gained ground and confidence eventually, without feeling the need to clown in order to attempt to get around being ostracised. Still thinking on that. Will enjoy rereading this book at a later stage. I feel like I’ve looked into highly articulated world I have previously had no idea of, that follows the literary journal style poems, but does something else, that makes the poems in this book, so much more than compliance with popular university formulae.
The title ‘Paper weight’ sums up the book nicely. There’s the beauty and translucence, quite often there in paperweights, the object’s heavy feeling and the stationary function.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the poems in this collection were of the type that hurt my brain - the vague, the obscure - but the poems I loved, I LOVED!
Not as enjoyable as a collection as "a bud", but still a delight.