So Many Moving Parts

Book excerpt: o Many Moving Parts, Tiffany Atkinson's third collection, is an eccentric 21st-century meditation on the awkwardness of body and spirit and their unexpected, often unwanted intrusions into the business of everyday life. Lyrical and experimental by turns, these poems push familiar events - commuting, telephones, babysitting, foreign travel - to open out toward unanswerable questions and elemental connections with an unstable physical world. A cast of real people observed over a year reveal momentary dramas as in a series of sketches, and the poet turns an ironic, unflinching eye on her own generation's transition from youth to middle age. Bold, wishful, ambivalent, sometimes even grudgingly affectionate, the collection is a spiky celebration of the almost invisible revelations that insist when you only look closely enough. Reviews of Tiffany Atkinson's Catulla et al: 'Thin-skinned, labile, multi-hued and engaging, these poems enact as much as describe. They are speech in action...; The poem...;becomes an event' - Oliver Reynolds, TLS. 'A smart, sardonic and vulnerable updating of Catullus...;Atkinson's versions are in the finest tradition of creative adaptation: keeping the originals as ballast, but unafraid to sail off on their own tangents...; Other poets translate Catullus; Atkinson creates Catulla, a modern, anxious, sympathetic and merciless persona, caught up in a life she sees through but can't quite get beyond' - Patrick McGuinness, Guardian. 'Occasional poems start conventionally enough in landscape of the weather and disclose their depths through tautness of style and singularly precise imagery. Others...;riskily balance captivating surfaces and dark narrative lacunae' - Douglas Houston, Poetry Review. 'Catulla augments Atkinson's fabulous inventory of metaphor and feeds her poems the drama of living language where lines stop in the middle, don't obey rules. Her work is funny and brave and Catulla exerts a moreish power over it' - Jackie Wills, The Warwick Review.