Near-Life Experience
The poems in "Near-Life Experience" are curious about the present moment, its weather and animals, its objects and things. They want to make it real in language, catching it before it vanishes. Documenting landscapes, paintings, insects and trees, Near-Life Experience offers a world where understanding is subverted by the day's distractions and the unexpected shapes of the imagination.
How do I relate to this? What does it mean? What's happening, exactly? Does experience experience me? With descriptive precision and inventiveness, the poet finds humour and panic at the edges of the actual. The poems measure expanding and contracting times, birthdays, seasons, climate breakdown, witnessing the moment and its "sheer / ongoing changes".
How do I relate to this? What does it mean? What's happening, exactly? Does experience experience me? With descriptive precision and inventiveness, the poet finds humour and panic at the edges of the actual. The poems measure expanding and contracting times, birthdays, seasons, climate breakdown, witnessing the moment and its "sheer / ongoing changes".
About the author
Rowland Bagnall was born in Oxfordshire in 1992. He studied English at St John's College, Oxford, and completed an MPhil in American Literature at the University of Cambridge. A selection of his poems were published in New Poetries VII (Carcanet, 2018). He lives and works in Oxford.