Wednesday 24 March 2010

No Exit - William Garvin (Arthur Shilling Press, 2010)


The poems in William Garvin's no exit hum and buzz with the sounds of malfunctioning technology. We are 'drowning in video screens' with a ': network systems overload > { }' You can see from these two lines from the opening poem of the sequence that we are going to be exploring the other side of technology, the side where it breaks down and we are left trying to cope, banging our heads against the keyboard. Perhaps that is the 'no exit' of the title. Windows open 'on eternity' or appear as '...window star pool...'s. Garvin uses the page like a vandal. Most poems scatter across the white space using the stuttering language of computers. Underscores, backslashes and html code are used as eccentric versions of punctuation. It's exhilarating. The sequence feels like a malfunctioning urban landscape from which there is no exit.

You can buy it here for a modest £2 + 50p postage direct from the excellent Arthur Shilling Press.

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