Just a Moment

Ian House’s writing begins in memory and experience, the variousness of living, and the tangles of thinking and feeling. As the poems acquire shape, detail and voice, they become celebrations of beauty and energy, examinations of cruelty and mortality. Ranging from Stevens’s blue guitar to a child drawing, from a medieval monk cataloguing saints’ bones to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the new work in Just a Moment: New and Selected Poems probes the transformations wrought by aging and poetic creation, exploring the nature of art through a central sequence on the paintings of Paul Nash. ‘Ian House’s new book is full of wry, thoughtful, fine lyric poetry. It concerns itself with absence and elusiveness, age and mortality but is never elusive or lacking in vigour. His poetic voice is fluent with anger, passion, hope and resounding clarity’—Sasha Dugdale From reviews of Nothing’s Lost (2014): ‘These poems invigorate the imagination, inviting the reader to join in their verbal aerobics. Like the peregrine, House can “strip life / to the bone like poetry”’—The North ‘House’s eye is clearly focused and his ear finely attuned. Like MacNeice he revels in “the drunkenness of things being various”’—London Magazine