Author(s): Ed Wright

Poetry

The poems in When Sky Becomes the Space Inside Your Head are a series of lyrical meditations that play with the relationship of inner states to the outside world, of individuals to others. These poems are accessible, welcoming even as they present troubling ideas as flashes in the sideshow of the mind. Wright's lyricism is one that questions its own values, the possibility of transcendence, and of using words to try and achieve it. Even if the poems build toward transcendent gestures, on arrival they often manifest as a pleasant emptiness, the post-coital lull that follows the unruly intensity of poetic thought. The epiphany is often a return to the everyday."Here language curves around and carves out the observed moment, a cascade detailing human relation; childhood quit but lingering, friendship long-settled in its silences, and love most of all, the sensual and compassion. Here is the body, with its wants and hungers, its ease and function. Here is the everyday and familiar in its teeming and idiom, a coherence of selves emerging amid time's passing. Wright notes to name is to kill, but amid the tension of the sensed and the spoken, in his poetry, words hold and give and open." - Michael Brennan