Dust Sheet

by Luke Heeley

Published 22 November 2012

Whisked away like an illusionist's cape or shaken out in the street, Dust Sheet throws off a cloud in which the world is made strange.

Here, the everyday is perpetually on the point of tipping over into mystery: a disused phone box becomes a portal, a cup of coffee swims with visions, a discarded surgical glove points towards a parallel reality.

Here, people are driven by their obsessions: drinking rainwater with a fork or trying to formulate a new theory of everything.

In this universe, imaginary figures – the contrarian, the imperfectionist – exist alongside the marginal of history – the Renaissance artist Piero di Cosimo and the Dutch biologist Jan Swammerdam.

Informed by philosophy, with a lyric sensibility and an appetite for formal variety, the poems in Dust Sheet seek to restore and re-enchant the overlooked.