Product Description
The poems in When Sky Becomes the Space Inside Your Head are a series of lyrical meditations that play with the relationship of inner states to the outside world, of individuals to others. These poems are accessible, welcoming even as they present troubling ideas as flashes in the sideshow of the mind. Wright’s lyricism is one that questions its own values, the possibility of transcendence, and of using words to try and achieve it. Even if the poems build toward transcendent gestures, on arrival they often manifest as a pleasant emptiness, the post-coital lull that follows the unruly intensity of poetic thought. The epiphany is often a return to the everyday.
“Here language curves around and carves out the observed moment, a cascade detailing human relation; childhood quit but lingering, friendship long-settled in its silences, and love most of all, the sensual and compassion. Here is the body, with its wants and hungers, its ease and function. Here is the everyday and familiar in its teeming and idiom, a coherence of selves emerging amid time’s passing. Wright notes to name is to kill, but amid the tension of the sensed and the spoken, in his poetry, words hold and give and open.” — Michael Brennan
Ed Wright is a poet and writer who lives with his wife and two children in Newcastle, Australia. His previous publications include five non-fiction titles, among them Ghost Colonies and The Left-handed History of the World, a chap book of poetry, The Empty Room, and two blues CDs (The Floating World and White Bread). He has written for a number of newspapers in Australia and overseas. Ed is a sometime teacher of Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle and has a Ph.D in American Literature from the University of Sydney. His favourite historical figure is Diogenes the Cynic, and he is very fond of Bertrand Russell’s essay, “In Praise of Idleness.” When not looking after toddlers, he likes staring into space and waiting for words.
REVIEWS
“The title poem, in two parts, is like an out-of-body experience or a drug-induced hallucination. There is a looking down from above, a realisation of the vastness of the world around you and your insignificance within that vastness. This appears to be a recurring theme throughout the collection. There is a sense of enlightenment about this poem, something that can’t be explained to those outside of it – an epiphany of sorts.” LISA WARDLE, Rochford Street Review
“It’s difficult to summarise the appeal of Wright’s book in a few hundred words. Sufficient to say that if you like poems rooted in real experience and not over-processed, you’ll find plenty to enjoy in this relatively short book with its rather long title.” GEOFF PAGE, The Australian (paywalled)
