Sometimes images get stuck in my head. They lie across my mind for days, sometimes for weeks and months. And when I try and brush them away they just stay there, like threads of cobweb you can’t quite reach that hang from high ceilings. They won’t drop into that place of knowledge and recognition where they can be slotted in and understood. They don’t want to go there. Instead they stick stubbornly to their own luminous strangeness, refusing to mean. All I can do with them is put them into poems because they will go there. So that’s what these poems are – images that got stuck. And sliding them across involves accepting that they will behave in pretty much the same way inside the poem – they won’t suddenly sit up and start to mean. They’ll just lie there.
So the act of making these poems is also an act of submission. To put it schematically: the image has authority, and the writing must defer to it. The poem has to shed some of its busy self-importance, to lose some of its intention, to go quiet. All the poems do, all they can do, is circle the image, go around the outside of it so that it can occupy the space in the middle.
And once I’d realised that, the actual writing – about a fence, or a man dying in a field, or the sound of a song – was easier than I’d imagined. I’m not saying that writing these poems was easy, but that it was important not to try too hard. Ease is an essential part of it. If the image is there, at the centre of things, then after that it is just a question of detail, of registering it as minutely as I can, bit by bit, so that it can be seen by somebody else. What these poems are, I hope, is a trace of that ease, because without ease there wouldn’t be a poem.