"Exit Strategy" by Patrick Wright

The cover shows a white space. You can fill that space with many things, but it will always remain an absence. A box where something is not that should be. This collection studies that absence and the ways in which the poet speaker is tied to the one who should occupy it. To explore the unexplorable, Wright draws on physics, nature, architecture, philosophy, mythology and art. The poems look outwards to look in and examine the implosion that loss creates. But variety isn’t the most remarkable thing about this collection, what’s remarkable is its unity. It turns death around and around under a spotlight, a microscope, in the light of unformed galaxies and through, around and before works of art. When someone returns to atoms, do they truly leave? Are they all around us and if they are, can we live without their embodied presence?

There is a trapped-ness within much of the work. Wright packs raw emotion into an often tight, clipped voice. The force of loss and grief fights against the structure and constrictedness of the lines. Many of the poems are cloven, contrapuntal, in dialogue with the lost, but also with the lost part of the speaker’s self which is now beyond death and can’t be reclaimed. A soul unravels on one side of a divide, while a physical body unravels on the other, its soul fled. The stellar debris of a person’s life. The irony of the fact that when a person’s body has disintegrated, it’s their loved ones' hearts that disintegrate, even though they themselves remain alive. These poems trace the shape of the speaker, or what’s left of the speaker after the dying have departed. In those remains is the cut-out shape of the lost.

In “Shadow of a Girl Playing with a Hula Hoop”, the ghost crawls across the page. In “Jardin La Nuit” the natural world falls apart and can’t hold itself toegther. In “Black on Maroon” we are in a nightmarish subland where the living can’t be alive and everything appears monochrome. In “Exist Strategy” helplessness turns the speaker inwards, against themselves. In “Ascent of the Blessed” the speaker is the floating soul, the thing suspended and not quite real anymore. “Black Square Redux” plays with time and space on the page, grapples with human and machine. Much of the ekphrastic poetry is interrogative, challenging the work of the artist.

Throughout, there is a cacophony of voices – the dead speak, a Greek chorus, paintings, the universe, even a photon still experiencing the Big Bang. But we are led back and back to the same thing – the lost cannot come back to life and often it is us are are trapped by that, not them. “Death means falling out of time and living the same life over and over again.” Is eternity a comfort or a repeat? How do you get off the train? What’s the exit strategy?

“My Series of Long Goodbyes” is a lens through which the rest of the collection can be viewed. The inflamed eyes of retinitis limit the view but deepen the gaze. Ultimately, this collection is about ways of seeing. How both death and art can limit the view and expand it at the same time. Like art, “chaos moves outwards, inexorably”. But always and forever it brings us back to the same immutable point – the separation of death can never be undone. Perhaps making poetry itself is the only exit strategy there is.