‘The human face is indeed, like the face of the God of some oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces juxtaposed on different planes so that one does not see them all at once.’  

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, Pt 2 trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Everyman, 2001), p. 260.

At best, a photograph opens up a middle ground of poetry between its author and its viewer.

Photography shows clearly that the camera is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.

Standing in a field
Listening to the insects
​After the deer have flown

To conjure the breadth of a world by excluding it in the frame of a photograph. 

`Dogs, also, bark at what they do not know.’ 

`A fool is excited by every word.’

`Eyes and ears are bad witnesses  to men who have barbarian souls.’

(Attributed to Heraclitus)

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), p. 53.

​`When you hear through your eyes, only then will you know' (Ssu-Hin).

Michel Houellebecq, ‘Dans l’aire limpide / In the clear air’, from his Unreconciled: Poems 1991 - 2013, trans. by Gavin Bowd (London, 2017).

A day of horizontal elements:


Telephone wires against the line of a cloud


stretched above that of a cargo ship 


against the distant coastline.




And these observed after a night when


I dreamed of myself lying flat on a riverbank


next to a crocodile


guarding me


or sizing me up


before devouring me


as prey.
​