the liberation of [placeholder]

by dylan harris
A5 landscape, 110pp, May 2012
50 colour plates, 3 B&W plates
published by The Knives, Forks & Spoons Press
ISBN 978-1-907812-75-0
€20 (plus P&P)
Contains a version of the smoke.

I find your style, visually and verbally, engaging and individual while utterly without posturing. Which is not the norm on any count. (Randolph Healy)

A work of art and a labour of love, worth every penny of the 16 pound asking price, The Liberation of [Placeholder] will grace any coffee table. More please. … I want to hold [this] up as a model for where, in this digital age, poetry in print should be bound. Poetry collections as artefacts …. (The Journal, Autumn 2012)

… let me say now how impressed I was by the big KFS collection, and especially by 'The Pale' because that seemed to epitomize your success at sustaining the image-text collaboration so cohesively. The fact that it uses photographs of images reflected in water (and ice? and rain?) and texts of poems printed in very light grey, effectively embodies the way they both operate as if shadows of a bolder version of themselves. So both poems and images, independently and together, are half-presences, visual and conceptual echo-chambers, constantly implying one another's cooperation. Although cooperation suggests something mechanical, while the effect created by each spread is one of delicate coincidence, matching the subject matter's concern with the relation between everyday routines and poetic vigilance towards states of exception. The lines are as if squared off, but the phrasing moves the eye and the ear in a fluid movement to the end of the poem, so again there's a sense of constantly adjusted balance, operating at all levels, a real finesse of attunement. Your consistency in this is very rare … (Rod Mengham)