Liturgy of the Calibrated Interval

The second poem measures a rest between two notes not in beats but in the exact distance a hand travels when it falls from a struck key to the lap — a unit the collection will use, and revise, and finally abandon without ceremony.

What remains uncertain, and what no amount of rereading quite resolves, is whether the speaker at the centre of these poems is calibrating intervals of sound or intervals of grief, and whether, for this speaker, the distinction has ever been meaningful.

The collection's hinge is the forty-first poem, which occupies the page the way a proof occupies a blackboard — not decoratively but structurally, each line cancelling the assumption the previous line had established as stable ground. Critics who insist the whole sequence builds toward that poem's final image are, one suspects, reading a different kind of book from those who find its logic recursive rather than accumulative, though both camps are responding to something genuinely there. The press's characteristic typeface and coarse grey covers serve these poems unexpectedly well: there is something about the tarnished silver of the foil-blocked title that already looks like a measurement, like a number that has been rounded down.

The last fourteen pages, which readers tend not to discuss in any detail even when pressed, exist in a different relation to silence than the rest.

What the collection quietly installs in a reader's thinking is a habit of noticing the intervals themselves — not the events, not the sounds, not the stated meanings, but the calibrated distances between them, which turn out, once you have learned to look, to be where most of the information lives.