Each Broken Object by David Greenslade

"Wonderful"
Poetry Quarterly Review

"Full of myth and mystery"
Poetry Wales

"Wry, fresh, startling"
Planet

"David Greenslade’s object poems work where edges become visible, local and urgent. He pays tribute to the gift exchange genre of Welsh poetry – of desire, display, exchange and alliance – also beauty and fantasy in which these new object poems are so rich. Very very exciting."
Andrew Duncan, poet and editor of Angel Exhaust.

"I am fascinated by David Greenslade’s poetic phenomenology and believe it is of the utmost relevance in today’s world where the “thinging of the thing” (as Heidegger put it) has slipped into forgetfulness."
Richard Kearney, author Wake of the Imagination.

"William Carlos Williams said “No ideas but in things” and I was reminded of this while reading about the things which this book is made. I especially enjoy its sounds, rhythms and subtle rhymes. I am especially pleased that engineering can play a passionate role in literary thinking."
Henry Potroski, author Remaking the World – Adventures in Engineering.


Paperclip

Who could combine as inscrutably
neither frowning nor approving
but, clearly having made a stand
at the top left of the paper, slipped
on and easily removed by hand.

Unwound into twisted cranks
between fingerprints and nails;
devised to mark, deface, scratch
a school desk, puncture wild eggs;
bulldog clips are no match

for versatile, self-enveloping
wire, three times its length un
stretched; has fixed breaks, bridles,
picked locks, prospected ear wax;
bees knees - its press never idle.


Lace

The bubbles we broke
can’t be fixed.

The crumbs I live on
want your bread again.

The lace
you pulled,

the battle,
the bobbin –

I know that country,
bigger than a footstep,

I know that time,
slower than a wound.

The stem I turn grows to you.
The sleeve you offer opens up.

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