Interference Effects

Claire Dyer's new collection takes our world of childhood, adulthood, love's end and its renewal and turns it a click or two off kilter. Everything here is thrillingly both "itself and something other". Like little translations or ventures into 'as if', using gently exploratory forms of surrealism that keep one foot on solid ground, the poems in Interference Effects draw the reader into a re-invigorated world of fishy glittering and butterfly glint. Dyer tells us the Chinese character for 'poem' is 'word - temple'; her poems are themselves little temples we enter dusty and over-familiar yet exit more alert to the world around us and our inner weathers. Martyn Crucefix This collection flickers with language as quick as the fish that swim in the poems, as the butterfly whose "light interference" is as real as it is suggestive, as illusory as it is sensuous. Meaning turns in a flick of a word, a phrase, an image, the familiar made strange: family love, sexual love, grief are turning silvers in darkness, the other side of the ordinary. Gillian Clarke

A second collection of poems from a maturing writer, in demand as judge and tutor, currently publishing novels as well as poetry.

Whether focusing in on catching fish off a pier, learning to speak Bird at night school, riding towards inspiration on horseback or thinking about manatees, the poems in Claire Dyer’s second collection offer a slantwise look at some of the experiences, both real and imagined, that can shape our lives. Influenced by Elizabeth Bishop and the Morpho butterfly, the pieces in Interference Effects shift and alter depending on the reader’s viewing angle. Infused by the colour blue, they compare a farmer harvesting to a recipe for Victoria sponge; show children learning to swim as a boy is buried at sea; tell of a heart left at a checkout as a curator’s assistant gives hers in for safekeeping. These pairings search for definition and meaning whilst acknowledging the beauty and strength in never actually being able to capture either.