By Claire Potter

Acanthus offers a collection of poems that dwell in the landscapes of the northern and southern hemispheres, evoking myth and fantasy and romance, as they move between observation and imagination. At the heart of Potter’s poetry is a keen awareness of the power of transformation, which brings the celestial and the physical, the imagined and the real closer to hand. The poems hold an ear to those wandering figures who, like Icarus, search the peripheries of those adjoining worlds for a way through, but instead often fall against the clockwork of the ordinary. Surreal gardens, repetitive geometry, rooms of clouds, witches and monsters, lie not outside the natural world but directly within it, mixing poetry and quotation, dream with prose. Each poem coexists at an angle to the next, sitting as if within the net of a wider page, seeking to embody the dramatic sense of reading and of falling right through its spaces.