Civilian Lyrics

Author: Dom Hale

Publisher: Veer Books (2020)

"Civilian Lyrics do something like assembly at a distance. Or maybe it’s an assembly in the distance. Or maybe it’s like what you’d get if you could put distance into the assembly. Anyway, in here—down the hall and byway—there’s transparencies and light, diagrams and attitudes, angles of incidence, mirrors and a history of faraway communication. There’s no big time to keep to; instead it’s dusty atmospherics of things against thing, meaning that translation, smudging, inversion, emphasis and movement provide the temporary glue. In that way, these poems are like break’s negative. Dozy and constrained, focused and pitchy. Renditions without weight."

—Tom Crompton