In The Islands of Chile, David Nash offers up an entirely new way of relating to the world through a poetry whose aim is ‘not to confine you to words but to write you back into yourself.’
Nash riffs on the variousness of Chile’s islands to articulate shifting relations between self, world and other, as we labour under the ‘henpeck we call “breath”’.
This is ecologically minded work, exquisitely tuned to the world’s conditional fragility and ablaze with its own truths and a fierce eros in which ‘to be touched / is to be proven.’
Always aware of the fallibilities and slippage of language where ‘you are not quite your name’ these poems are singular, tender and often breathtaking. Nash wrests with the stuff of language, and lets the reader in on the act, seeking lived truths, stalking love, capturing the strangeness and beauty of sentience.