Touching the nerve ends

It's always nice to be appreciated. Does that sound glib or what? Peter Crisp, the Napier poet who has been a regular contributor to brief since the journal's inception in the mid-90s, sent me this comment on the review of Will Christie's chapbook Re:[play]er which I included in issue 34:

It's amazing how smooth talkers are usually glib talkers...I love in that respect the poem you quote of Will-Joy Christie and agree with your comments on it. That is the sort of thing poets me included should be doing, not following the dialogue of their brains and all those surfaces of discourse. Will-Joy has a very sharp ear and many registers strike sparks off each other in her short space which is a desperately inventive, honest space of someone finding out at alst how to utter a bitter-sweet piece of her disturbed and cool-eyed heart, her inventive survival heart, which is the most expressive part of all of us if we ever dare to go there...

thanks for singling out a good example of poetry doing what it should be doing, i.e. treading the edge and speaking from the nerve-ends in a fresh way it always exacts or should exact from us.

Titus Books will be launching Will's first full-length book of poems next month, along with the efforts of a couple of ne'er do wells. Details soon.