Tripping Over Clouds

by Lucy Burnett

Tripping Over Clouds issues a bold challenge to Ezra Pound’s maxim to ‘go in fear of abstractions.’ Underpinning this is a re-imagining of abstraction as a prior state of possibility from which the world and ourselves are constantly re-emerging—as abstraction to, not from. Both philosophical and fresh, the poetry dances across, off and back into the page, like the mountain runner in its opening ‘to talk about / the pleasure principle / of falling downhill fastly.’ Lucy Burnett’s second collection ranges from the hills, to questions of love, and responses to twentieth century abstract art. It ends with poems which ask what identity can mean any longer in the current political climate. Tripping Over Clouds marks the consolidation of an original voice in British poetry. This is poetry about, and of, beauty.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

Published August 27, 2019

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is a setup for the often surrealist approach, but where another Carcanet poet, Caroline Bird, is warm and funny with her absurdism, Burnett is just … weird. Like, I’d get two stanzas into a poem and have no idea what was going on or what she was trying to say because of the incomplete phrases and non-standard punctuation. Still, this is a long enough collection that there are a good number of standouts about nature and relationships, and alliteration and paradoxes are used to good effect. I liked the wordplay in “The flight of the guillemet” and the off-beat love poem “Beer for two in Brockler Park, Berlin.” The noteworthy Part III is composed of 34 ekphrastic poems, each responding to a different work of (usually modern) art.

Favourite lines:

This is a place of uncalled-for space
and by the grace of the big sky,
and the serrated under-silhouette of Skye,
an invitation to the sea unfolds
to come and dine with mountain.

(from “Big Sands”)

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

im thinking hadfield

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought this on a whim in Sedbergh. Really enjoyed it.