Remains to Be Seen
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€18.50
"In David Rushmer's stunning book, Remains to Be Seen, we find a carefully crafted rendering of a voice in the world, each syllable of this drama earned. There is a microtonal attention to reality and a gorgeous music throughout. This is a truly remarkable first book." -Peter Gizzi
"David Rushmer's poetry can come as a shock. The power of the writing comes from a compelling manipulation of rhythmic devices combined with an insistence on a pared-down word-hoard constantly revisited. It is intense. It has great scope. It has a primitive, elemental feel, with an attention to rhythmic and sonic detail.
Rushmer has acknowledged his debts to French writers such as Maurice Blanchot and Bernard Noel, and it is the case that his own work doesn't seem to fit comfortably into any particular tradition of British writing. This, of course, is one of its great strengths, Rushmer is a European writer.
The title of the book is as deft as any of its contents in managing to hint at a devastated landscape consisting of nothing but remains, as well as a glimmer of hope in the other sense of the phrase `it remains to be seen.' I have a high regard for this work. It is subtly crafted, deeply serious and disturbingly memorable." -Peter Hughes
David Rushmer was born in 1965, and works at the English Faculty Library, University of Cambridge. Remains to Be Seen is his first full collection, and contains key poems dating from the 1990s, with the majority thereafter composed in the 2000s. They include work previously published in the pamphlets: Sand Writings, The Family of Ghosts, and Blanchot's Ghost.
The recurring themes of the poems deal with the magnetic fluctuation of elements, the ethereal versus the material. The spoken voice versus the physical self; the origins of a written `other' and the genetics of the corporeal and how writing simultaneously validates and negates identity by leaving traces of the writer, signifiers of something no longer there, waiting in abeyance to breathe new life, resurrected in the body of the reader.