‘where atoms start dancing their deliciousness.’ – Fem Kinétique

It’s one thing to write the perilously transcendent love lyrics Philip Ruthen is increasingly recognized for. It is quite another to blink quizzically at each experience from the corner of your eye as you leave the last stanza. That too is what Ruthen achieves in these pieces, and the edges of travel suggested in the title poem. Ruthen’s polemical sensibilities might be subordinate to his poetics, but they infuse his Sinclairesque territory, gritty nerve ends spiral an alternative tube map of London. It plunges through alienation and the juggernaut mental health edicts Ruthen polices by day.

At twilight, his exquisite and tender love lyrics explore, as one reader quotes Ruthen. a ‘wholeness of woman’ and the very notion of love. Travel creatively displaces both politics and love so they return and ask it questions. This is what moving about does to Ruthen: he strips out a foreign eco-system and hauls it back to a poem. And love there has never seemed both so calm and restless, like a dark knot of night wind informing perhaps his finest poems.

This is a genuinely stunning debut volume, the more so because its ruffled poise is so chiselled, so haunted, and so memorable.

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Eyewear review ‘Guest Review: Almond On Ruthen and Dullaghan’, 24 April 2010 by Liz Almond on Todd swift’s blogspot