Tripping Over Clouds

Burnett, Lucy (2019) Tripping Over Clouds. Carcanet Press. ISBN 9781784107437

Abstract

Tripping Over Clouds issues a bold challenge to Ezra Pound’s maxim to ‘go in fear of abstractions’. Underpinning this is a re-imagining of abstraction as a prior state of possibility and potential from which the world and ourselves are constantly re-emerging – as abstraction to, not from. Both philosophical and fresh, the poetry trips off and back onto the page, like the fellrunner in its opening section: ‘to talk about / the pleasure principle / of falling downhill fastly’. Lucy Burnett’s second collection explores how we fetch up with the world in all its variety, difficulty and beauty, ranging across encounters with mountains, love, contemporary politics and visual art. Ultimately this is a poetry which asserts hope, and playfulness, as strategies for navigating an inherently changeable sense of now.