The poems in “Near-Life Experience” are curious about the world, the present moment, its weather and animals, its objects and things. They want to make it real in language before it changes, vanishes. Documenting landscapes, paintings, insects, and trees, “Near-Life Experience” experiments in precision. Understanding is subverted by the day's distractions and the unexpected shapes of the imagination.
How do I relate to this? What does it mean? What's happening, exactly? Does experience experience me? Description shapes into a different precision, the poet finds humour and panic at the changing edges of the actual. The poems include a variety of walk-on parts—from Breughel's hunters in the snow and American painter Richard Diebenkorn to nineteenth-century geologist James Hutton and the poet's own friends and intimates. They measure his expanding and contracting times, birthdays, seasons, climate breakdown, witnessing the moment and its 'sheer / ongoing changes'.
