What Space Between Us by David Rushmer
"Rushmer's spare and abstract linguistic structures may well be unique in contemporary British poetry, drawing, as they do, on a European poetic tradition that questions the nature of language and its relationship with perception. Words are valued for their own sake, held up for examination and made to chime like struck glass. To the crystalline abstractions that Rushmer inherits from French poetry is added Taoist-inspired spirituality and the influence of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy in an amalgam of great beauty. What Space Between Us is a landmark collection; a wide-ranging and rich series of poems, which asks time and attention of the reader, but will repay it abundantly." —Alan Baker
"In the magazine Molly Bloom a little over a year ago David Rushmer’s poem ‘Meeting Me Halfway’ offered us ‘language as shape, a direction of breath’. Rather like Samuel Beckett’s Malone differentiated one experience from another ‘in the outcry without’ so Rushmer’s poetry offers the reader a ‘sky unloaded of its ghosts.’ After reviewing Remains to Be Seen (Shearsman, 2018) I had been left with that haunting sense of a poetry which lingers in the reader’s mind long after the book itself has been put down. The shape and direction of Rushmer’s individual voice are traced onto the page and they leave precise lines of marked engraving: reflections to return to time and again." —Ian Brinton
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