Winner, Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 2000

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION

Dennis Casling is a new, interesting and entertaining poet. He is also blind. As a poet, he describes what he sees, working from visual memory, the imagination, and often from dreams or dreamlike states. He says: "The act of seeing is informed by the imagination. I am not distracted by the visual. I spend my time looking at the invisible."'

Church Window

A blind man looks at a photograph

Your hand on mine moves mine from side to side
across the photograph. In one corner
hang cobwebs, sagging under the unseen
weight of age. Our hands, like coupling spiders,
examining the candid rectangle
of church window. A lengthened cross divides
panes of clear glass. Paint peels from the recess,
where dead carnations in a stone vase turn
to dust

This broken moment where we focus
in hand and eye all our expectation.
Beyond the rectangle, beyond the cross,
beyond the desiccating, flaking stone,
my finger traces suddenly a crest
of hill descending like your collar bone..