Poetry review – LIES BLURRING HERE: Nick Cooke looks at a new collection by Adam Piette which is concerned both with the search for clarity and the avoidance of it
Lies Blurring Here
Adam Piette
Broken Sleep Books
ISBN 978-1-917617-75-8
pp 76 £13.99
Principally known as the co-editor of online poetry magazine Blackbox Manifold, and the author of several well-regarded critical books, Sheffield University’s Professor of Modern Literature Adam Piette has also had poetry published, including nights as dreaming (2023) and CCCLXV (2025). The speed with which he has followed up the latter with this latest offering from Broken Sleep Books indicates he is going through a period of particular inspiration as a poet.
While the title adumbrates issues around truth, mendacity and the often fuzzy boundaries in between, the collection itself observes the contemporary world with eyes that are anything but blurred. “Nights as Dreaming”, the opening poem, introduces an important element in Piette’s concerns, the relations between dream and reality. The opening lines give us a torrent of imagery and a significant literary allusion:
Night rises from the seas like sheets of dark rain sweeping up crossed light,
as figures batten down, read Keats, & fumble at their icy coats,
dreaming deliverance, visions of waters,
cheeks touch in the dance, the breath of lovers,
clouds roll, reveal where heavens meet, and deep blues, spirit riding heights
Deliverance of whatever form might be something we can only dream of, like other ideals – the Hollywood-based Astaire-like romance of dancing cheek to cheek, the lovers’ transitory breathing. Keats and the ‘icy coats’ recalls “The Eve of St Agnes”, which offers a different take on imaginative roving, and might also be an allusion to contemporary human coldness, or rather the cloaks that various members of so-called society lay over their emotions. The poem’s later stanzas develop the idea of the ‘mind liquifiably alive’; I take this to be the poetic or artistic mind, though it could also allude to the need to keep mentally supple more generally. ‘There is peace in the translucent air, & life in the transparencies’: is Piette hankering after such peace, or merely indicating it’s a pursuable option that may involve sacrifices, for instance of poetic vitality? He seems to conceive liquifiability, the flow of water, as a metaphor for mental evolution, the constancy of the ephemeral:
copper leaves stamped to moss under aquafluency : the flow
of peaty water over flesh : orange
feet freeze : a quivering in the so-strange
thorn trees announcing your new mind
‘Your new mind’, a phrase later half-echoed by ‘the mind revives again’ (in “In the Sunlight, Dazed”), proffers an almost Heraclitan view of the cerebral function and process, as if you can never activate the same mind twice, so constantly is it evolving. This is both our burden and our potential salvation.
A significant issue emerges in “The Sofa”, which ends ‘Seesaw, swing, little / sleepwalkers: so far so comfy’, suggesting how easy it is to slip into somnolent complacency, even smugness. The conclusion to the excellent “Last Acre” hints at a related theme, that of the need to cast away convenience, to rise above banal quotidianity, and to accept that (as Beckett and Dylan have reminded us) success is a fiction, quite literally for the birds:
Fern clumps consolidate their inwardness.
You see but are not here as sparrow falls;
Take your comfort away & your largesse
& your antimony. Allow all to fail.
A poet’s supposed insight into the nature of a bird (even Keats’) doesn’t constitute effective empathy; even ‘antimony’, the sphere of intelligent contradiction, falls short of what nature contains and represents.
An adroit villanelle, “Missing” (the title perhaps referencing Empson’s example of the same genre, “Missing Dates”, with one word of course missing), reinforces some of what I take to be key Piette concepts:
Time turns the art of losing into gain:
watch the fluttering flight of pipistrelle
repeat, return, revolve, & say again:
“Sing loss away & in depth loved refrain”.
Lyric poetry, of the kind Piette continues to believe in, despite its inevitable and largely inbuilt limitations, seeks to alleviate pain and grief, without ever doubting the scale and even impossibility of the task. The faint echo from the end of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” in the penultimate line – becoming less faint in that the line is itself repeated, returned, revolved and said again, because of the villanelle form – implies how hard it is ‘not to yield’.
The poem I liked best was “Swifts”, which, as Piette observes in a footnote, draws upon a number of poetic forbears who have written about these birds, although he does not reference a possibly more pertinent stylistic antecedent, Hopkins in “The Windhover”:
Their sweree sweree, scimitar upsweep,
hard-fletched veer & arrow-
thwack – with scythe’s strong downwash,
vortex-generant, snarl-gape hunts
death-mote, above all dream.
Piette’s update on sprung rhythm, another form of ‘fluttering flight’, nicely captures the swift’s part-darting, part-duck-and-diving movement, and ‘above all dream’ is intriguingly ambivalent: does he mean that the bird transcends all dreaming, or that it is ‘above all’ a dream? Following on, ‘o lovely / swerves & faultless curves, seeking / & seeking’ picks up the idea of unending search, which a later poem, “There, See Ceaseless Seas”, flips into an implicit warning against the complacency one might derive from readings, superficial ones at least, of work like the final lines of ‘Four Quartets’:
it was strange the confidence
they have that all
would be well, as if it were
Piette occasionally delves into the past for reference points, such as in the prose piece “The Stele in the Woods”, a form of homage to Apollinaire, whom Piette regards as the finest French World War One poet, and who never fully recovered from a bomb explosion that left shrapnel in his brain (though he actually died of Spanish ’flu in the notorious 1918-20 epidemic). Piette has translated some of Apollinaire’s work, with various lines appearing here, most memorably ‘the horrific glow of the blasts / add their sudden clarity / to your soft eyes o madeleine’. The poet’s fiancée’s beauty is brought into sharper focus, and thrown into relief, by the brutal realities of war – a refuge to which he clings, while never losing sight of why he needs that refuge.
As the collection neared its end, I enjoyed the more whimsical note of “Pressure in the Ear”, where Piette nimbly invokes the proximity of death and laconically backs up his earlier admonitions against self-deception, in the face of the ultimate reality:
far off in the sugarcane
some men count coin & blurt their rum & beer
as though they owned the place :: pay ferryman,
before you dream of Jószef by his lake,
pay dues & leave :: quiet in the sky gleams moon ::
it’s not enough to lyric or to nod :: try shriek.
To rewrite Dylan slightly, you may have spent your time as a slave-owner, and a partaker of extreme worldly comfort, but you’re gonna have to not only serve somebody, but look the ferryman in the face. Shrieking might well be the best option. These lines distil so much of what is to be valued in this sometimes unflinchingly candid, always richly allusive and meditative collection.
As the book’s final lines imply, in “The Words that Came”, our putative death-bed pleas not to be cut off, discarded or forgotten are best expressed parenthetically, since it may only be our humility (if such we possess) that saves us, even if we never find out what it is we’re saved from:
smooth rain
falls on the ways
(sever me not)
the ink flows
along lines
(hold me close)
as roads
hiss
(remember me)
to fields
Aug 17 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Adam Piette
Poetry review – LIES BLURRING HERE: Nick Cooke looks at a new collection by Adam Piette which is concerned both with the search for clarity and the avoidance of it
Lies Blurring Here
Adam Piette
Broken Sleep Books
ISBN 978-1-917617-75-8
pp 76 £13.99
Principally known as the co-editor of online poetry magazine Blackbox Manifold, and the author of several well-regarded critical books, Sheffield University’s Professor of Modern Literature Adam Piette has also had poetry published, including nights as dreaming (2023) and CCCLXV (2025). The speed with which he has followed up the latter with this latest offering from Broken Sleep Books indicates he is going through a period of particular inspiration as a poet.
While the title adumbrates issues around truth, mendacity and the often fuzzy boundaries in between, the collection itself observes the contemporary world with eyes that are anything but blurred. “Nights as Dreaming”, the opening poem, introduces an important element in Piette’s concerns, the relations between dream and reality. The opening lines give us a torrent of imagery and a significant literary allusion:
Night rises from the seas like sheets of dark rain sweeping up crossed light,
as figures batten down, read Keats, & fumble at their icy coats,
dreaming deliverance, visions of waters,
cheeks touch in the dance, the breath of lovers,
clouds roll, reveal where heavens meet, and deep blues, spirit riding heights
Deliverance of whatever form might be something we can only dream of, like other ideals – the Hollywood-based Astaire-like romance of dancing cheek to cheek, the lovers’ transitory breathing. Keats and the ‘icy coats’ recalls “The Eve of St Agnes”, which offers a different take on imaginative roving, and might also be an allusion to contemporary human coldness, or rather the cloaks that various members of so-called society lay over their emotions. The poem’s later stanzas develop the idea of the ‘mind liquifiably alive’; I take this to be the poetic or artistic mind, though it could also allude to the need to keep mentally supple more generally. ‘There is peace in the translucent air, & life in the transparencies’: is Piette hankering after such peace, or merely indicating it’s a pursuable option that may involve sacrifices, for instance of poetic vitality? He seems to conceive liquifiability, the flow of water, as a metaphor for mental evolution, the constancy of the ephemeral:
copper leaves stamped to moss under aquafluency : the flow
of peaty water over flesh : orange
feet freeze : a quivering in the so-strange
thorn trees announcing your new mind
‘Your new mind’, a phrase later half-echoed by ‘the mind revives again’ (in “In the Sunlight, Dazed”), proffers an almost Heraclitan view of the cerebral function and process, as if you can never activate the same mind twice, so constantly is it evolving. This is both our burden and our potential salvation.
A significant issue emerges in “The Sofa”, which ends ‘Seesaw, swing, little / sleepwalkers: so far so comfy’, suggesting how easy it is to slip into somnolent complacency, even smugness. The conclusion to the excellent “Last Acre” hints at a related theme, that of the need to cast away convenience, to rise above banal quotidianity, and to accept that (as Beckett and Dylan have reminded us) success is a fiction, quite literally for the birds:
Fern clumps consolidate their inwardness.
You see but are not here as sparrow falls;
Take your comfort away & your largesse
& your antimony. Allow all to fail.
A poet’s supposed insight into the nature of a bird (even Keats’) doesn’t constitute effective empathy; even ‘antimony’, the sphere of intelligent contradiction, falls short of what nature contains and represents.
An adroit villanelle, “Missing” (the title perhaps referencing Empson’s example of the same genre, “Missing Dates”, with one word of course missing), reinforces some of what I take to be key Piette concepts:
Time turns the art of losing into gain:
watch the fluttering flight of pipistrelle
repeat, return, revolve, & say again:
“Sing loss away & in depth loved refrain”.
Lyric poetry, of the kind Piette continues to believe in, despite its inevitable and largely inbuilt limitations, seeks to alleviate pain and grief, without ever doubting the scale and even impossibility of the task. The faint echo from the end of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” in the penultimate line – becoming less faint in that the line is itself repeated, returned, revolved and said again, because of the villanelle form – implies how hard it is ‘not to yield’.
The poem I liked best was “Swifts”, which, as Piette observes in a footnote, draws upon a number of poetic forbears who have written about these birds, although he does not reference a possibly more pertinent stylistic antecedent, Hopkins in “The Windhover”:
Their sweree sweree, scimitar upsweep,
hard-fletched veer & arrow-
thwack – with scythe’s strong downwash,
vortex-generant, snarl-gape hunts
death-mote, above all dream.
Piette’s update on sprung rhythm, another form of ‘fluttering flight’, nicely captures the swift’s part-darting, part-duck-and-diving movement, and ‘above all dream’ is intriguingly ambivalent: does he mean that the bird transcends all dreaming, or that it is ‘above all’ a dream? Following on, ‘o lovely / swerves & faultless curves, seeking / & seeking’ picks up the idea of unending search, which a later poem, “There, See Ceaseless Seas”, flips into an implicit warning against the complacency one might derive from readings, superficial ones at least, of work like the final lines of ‘Four Quartets’:
it was strange the confidence
they have that all
would be well, as if it were
Piette occasionally delves into the past for reference points, such as in the prose piece “The Stele in the Woods”, a form of homage to Apollinaire, whom Piette regards as the finest French World War One poet, and who never fully recovered from a bomb explosion that left shrapnel in his brain (though he actually died of Spanish ’flu in the notorious 1918-20 epidemic). Piette has translated some of Apollinaire’s work, with various lines appearing here, most memorably ‘the horrific glow of the blasts / add their sudden clarity / to your soft eyes o madeleine’. The poet’s fiancée’s beauty is brought into sharper focus, and thrown into relief, by the brutal realities of war – a refuge to which he clings, while never losing sight of why he needs that refuge.
As the collection neared its end, I enjoyed the more whimsical note of “Pressure in the Ear”, where Piette nimbly invokes the proximity of death and laconically backs up his earlier admonitions against self-deception, in the face of the ultimate reality:
far off in the sugarcane
some men count coin & blurt their rum & beer
as though they owned the place :: pay ferryman,
before you dream of Jószef by his lake,
pay dues & leave :: quiet in the sky gleams moon ::
it’s not enough to lyric or to nod :: try shriek.
To rewrite Dylan slightly, you may have spent your time as a slave-owner, and a partaker of extreme worldly comfort, but you’re gonna have to not only serve somebody, but look the ferryman in the face. Shrieking might well be the best option. These lines distil so much of what is to be valued in this sometimes unflinchingly candid, always richly allusive and meditative collection.
As the book’s final lines imply, in “The Words that Came”, our putative death-bed pleas not to be cut off, discarded or forgotten are best expressed parenthetically, since it may only be our humility (if such we possess) that saves us, even if we never find out what it is we’re saved from:
smooth rain
falls on the ways
(sever me not)
the ink flows
along lines
(hold me close)
as roads
hiss
(remember me)
to fields