Long Pass

'Ach! I misspoke. What I mean to say is this ...' In Long Pass, Joey Connolly's first collection, the poet – in love, in puzzlement, in frustration or in elegy – keeps catching himself out, starting again. He wants to speak truthfully. He wants to say things simply. But nothing is as simple as it seems at first. Nothing strikes the interlocutor quite as he intends. Ach! He goes back. Deflections, tangents: the long pass, the long unfolding sentence, the growing sequence, move away from what they intend to say in order at last, wittily, angrily, ironically, to swerve in and say it. Translation, too, is hard. There are often competing versions – of Lorca, for example, and Cavafy. ' The painter is frustrated to be always / painting onto something, to be / concealing precisely as he displays.' Words reveal and at the same time conceal, yet what they conceal is part of what they want to say. The poet throws the poem for someone who isn't always there to catch. The fortunate reader intercepts. Long Pass is narrated by people who set out to communicate something simple and heartfelt, and who get caught up mid-expression in the social and linguistic complexities of communication: how can we say what we mean when language is made up with sets and sets of social values, cultural biases, linguistic tics, etymological convolutions and inconsistencies? Come to that, how can we explain what we feel to ourselves, when we do so in a common, intersubjective language? It's a poetry which believes the most arcane quibbling of analytic philosophy and the purplest of sentimentality can't be held apart; that stonily rational language often conceals or represses – and therefore implies – chaotic emotional depths, and vice versa. Long Pass is fascinated by the ways that translation, formal structures, jokes and word games can be a way of disrupting our ability to present ourselves as we unconsciously desire to do, and so become a way of being more honest or self-revelatory than honesty or confession. Much-anticipated debut collection by one of the key contributors to New Poetries VI