A Few Interiors

A Few Interiors is the debut collection from an alumnus of Carcanet’s New Poetries series, and a recent favourite in the pages of PN Review. Rowland Bagnall’s poems are, in various ways, about seeing things—movies, paintings, landscapes, rooms—and seeing or not seeing the frames that hold them: windows, screens, fields of vision. The poems play with the fixity of those frames, threatening to go beyond them, blurring the distinction between inside and out, interior and exterior. Full of playful glitches and malfunctions, this is a poetry of misses and near-misses, distortions and uncertainties. The poems capture a feeling of déjà vu, a sense of something not quite right, out of place, though hard to put your finger on. They are filled with pop-cultural references and registers, responding with a collagist’s eye to music, painting, photography, television and film. Frequently funny and even more frequently fun, Bagnall’s poems cut across continents, memories, dreams, and rooms.