Cutting the Quick

“Ian House has created a world alive with luminous, existential clarity – playful, often sinister and always a little surreal. As much painter as philosopher, House illuminates his poems with an enormous visual delicacy, particularly strong in the poems set in Russia and Eastern Europe. I gabbled to strangers in the dark / as silence piled like snow. His intense sensibility creates a world stilled, flashing with colour, where meaning resides in the strange material beauty of the objective. Throughout the collection, in fragments of flight, sharp moments of solitary colour and sensuous detail, the formless takes on intricate form.” ~ Jane Draycott