Connor Jones: Neutral Wisowb

Contains four short poems and one long poem called ‘1Grey’, a virtuosic, hi-res, trompe l’oeil depiction of consciousness. There are vivid dropdowns into childhood, sleep, sex, swimming, stilt prolegs, spherical intensity, stock mortality, and Steinian meditations on shape and colour. But what propels it forwards is an astonishing facility with syntax and sound. Stevens told us of the pleasure of ‘the merely going round, / Until merely going round is a final good, / The way wine comes at a table in a wood.’ Connor works in folds rather than rounds, but the poems are full of pleasure, of reality and its distortions, of ‘what they call atmosphere’.