Joe Dunthorne is a novelist who understands that joking can be the most powerful way of being serious. In his most recent novel, The Adulterants, his abject protagonist survives (only just) through last-ditch gags. How would his mutinous humour translate into poetry? The answer is: brilliantly. The delight of this debut collection is in watching a joker shuffle the darkest pack of cards. He travels so fast and far within the short spaces of his poems that readers must fasten their safety belts and be ready for anything. Including turbulence – obviously.
The opening poem, A Sighting, about seeing a bear while camping, introduces a defining theme: transformation. There is nothing Dunthorne’s imagination cannot turn inside out (not the same as saying there is nothing it cannot heal). He does not believe in seeing straight and that is the pleasure of reading him. This sighting might prove lethal. But the calculated symmetry of the lost actor within the bear and the bear within the human being is offered as a rescuing conceit.
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