Description

In Silk Work, Imogen Cassels’ debut collection, desire and grief are a double-edged subject, elucidated through a kind of lyric diffidence. Forms, translations, folksongs, geographies of longing, and the work of memory are interplayed, though always with the haunting implication that the words we use to document our lives are never quite enough.

As they weave multiple sources from literature, philosophy, visual art and history into ways of reading and documenting, the poems in Silk Work are an exercise in language’s inbuilt, radiant futility, which is both its suffering and its joy.

‘Cassels’ marvellous Silk Work makes an art and craft of witnessing, bringing to the page the simple complexities of revelation and the complex simplicities of reveries hard-won. Language and narration here trouble forms of dedication and all its implications with fervent, steadying and unsettling control. Full of minerals and lights, songs and invitations, threads and spinnings-out: a collection to be treasured.’ – Eley Williams

‘This book is an astonishment – its birds, suns, melancholy, balletic leaps, tender zingers, its “citational beatitude”. Cassels’ poems are skitteringly, ferociously alive. They are bucolic; they are urbane. Each poem feels like its own peculiar dawn, a striking apparition.’ – Maureen McClane

‘Silk Work folds then re-folds the increments of an intensely lived day, whether in “hot January”, a church-cool summer, or mornings dotted with “freezing dew”.  “Will you come and see me again before the world ends?” asks the one who speaks inside these poems. Or: “I want to eat foam, like a cardinal”. That’s not a question, it’s a “portrait of yours truly”, the moment where “attention becomes form”.’ – Bhanu Kapil

‘Cassels’ extraordinary book Silk Work feels both singular and choral – singular in that she has already established her own distinctive chorality… This agile, subtle, purposeful work produces in me a kind of vigilance which feels portable and sustaining.’ – Oli Hazzard

‘Silk Work erupts with desire and grief the way desire and grief can erupt at home on the sofa. Plainly, prosaically when “life is just bearable”, or if “i’m tired of feeling/like Christ – at night”, Cassels maps a new vocabulary for the fraught distance between what we want and what is. When it aches, when it’s not enough, Cassels splits and re-locates feeling into mercurial formations. Halting into stillness, dancing like folklore, hypothesising until wisdom arrives like votive filaments: “Spirit is a bone; / hail is cashmere;”, “you could do that with anything, couldn’t you?”. A truly mesmeric voice I wanted more, more!’ – Eve Esfandiari-Denney

‘I am in awe of the way Cassels combines nouns, sounds and histories with life, where the craft is both eccentric and full of attuned resonances to Lyric cultures. New paradigms are woven, then shot through. Her clarities are heartbreakingly and acutely timed, her discoveries intricate. This is fine, fine, fine work.’ – Holly Pester

Imogen Cassels is the author of Chesapeake, Mother, beautiful things, VOSS, and Arcades. She lives in London.