Another Place

This book is about other places, whether physical or psychological, which the mind can occupy alongside the everyday. Barlow is concerned with the otherness of experienced reality, a sense there is always somewhere or someone else on the other side of the present, `a life I’ve not lead/ waiting to lead me home’. These poems combine various degrees of fiction, biography and autobiography and are triggered by a range of sources – from personal experience to newspaper articles, from modern novels and artworks to the voyages of Captain Cook, from the rural Lancashire environment where Barlow lives to the Shetland Islands. Although usually drawing from some reported or directly experienced reality, whether or not he sets out to do so, Barlow inevitably finds himself addressing the current of thoughts and emotions that underlie daily events – the undertow, as it were – a sense of unease, edginess and transience. Sometimes playful, occasionally lyrical, often unnerving, the poems work off one another to create a sense of a world less certain than it at first seems, `another place’ within everyday reality.