This book had me at "Martini Rosso on the mantlepiece," though also: the last glimpse of plum trees in blossom (from a death-bed), and the "dull primrose/white" of a wall in a seaside town that the speaker will never visit again. Martin Corless-Smith has written a tidal work: the intense present of making art, and the sensory surge of the last minutes, or hours, of an artist's life. Something ebbs: "No, I can’t recall having met her. Once I was bowled over in the ocean...." Something appears: "...another world, like a door underwater." This is perimeter consciousness, drawn from what lies beyond the frame: a sky that's only and actually "colour," and a sense of natural time that's both entropic and livid: "Lichen-like." A painter and poet, Corless-Smith draws upon the water table of his own gifts to preserve, destroy and create The ongoing mystery of the disappearing self, again and again. "Call the beautiful a surge in feeling an atmosphere a reaction a response to the world to our senses but whatever it is it cannot be held fast." I keep returning to this line as the watermark or imprint of this collection, something that's both a part of the paper it's written on and the means of its dissolution.

—Bhanu Kapil