Publisher's Synopsis
Annemarie Austin's richly imaginative, unsettling poems are like paintings in which what is seen is held as it is about to happen, or as it has just happened. They evoke thresholds or border states in which (as Augustine observed) the present does not exist because it is instantly past, stepping off into other experiences, from dark into light, present into past, life into death, land into sea, from 'the beach at dusk under a squally wind'. In Snowcase a woman is buried alive for eight days in a snowdrift; in So, 'I found at the heart of each of his paintings/ an opening left for me to enter, his air or ground/ or water slipping backwards beneath my walking eyes.'
