This energetic first collection moves freely from the world of professional snooker to drunken adolescent escapades. Slater contemplates the art of moving furniture, the marginalia of monastic scribes and daydreams in a Japanese garden. Depicting care or abandon, the poems reflect on that unique carefree care for language that is poetry itself.
‘What you’re after comes before and haunts your wanting it....’
Surpassing Pleasure pulls hard in two directions. Launching for ‘the every-coloured light / streaming through the bright rose-window,’ or savouring ‘flow caught longing for the ground,’ the poems arrive at surprised moments of fusion; for instance, the poet Li Po in ‘Overboard’ who, in his attempt to embrace the moon’s reflection on the water, comes to ‘rest on the bottom of / the duckpond.’
Whether straining at the leash of formal constraints like a watchdog ‘hot on the trail of his own release’ ... or nestling into them like ‘bees nuzzling into ... rain-wet petals,’ Slater combines density and compression with an expressive, fluent music. Open forms, even at their most ragged and disjunctive, remain rhythmically knit and crafted, while the occasional sonnet, villanelle, or ghazal retains something of the ease and authenticity of speech.