Slow Burn

Suddenly there’s a room missing in the house. Just yesterday there was a door, now it’s gone. A path opens through the forest, which fades as you enter. Disappearance, absence, these are now integral to everything you do: watching the clouds, laying the table for dinner. In these intensely intimate explorations of personal loss, Jordi Doce takes us on a journey in which poetry is both a means and an end, a way of seeking new harmony with a painfully altered world, and a testament of enduring love. ‘Jordi Doce is one of the three or four living European poets whose work I most treasure. He brings all his faculties to the rich task of being; his voice inhabits the names, not just with wonder, but with new possibilities; he is a companion not a guide, always present with us, never merely pointing what he thinks might be the way.’ John Burnside