Daniel Sluman’s bleak brilliance in the terrible is a masterclass in the power of poetry to confront some of the most difficult subject matter with accuracy and painstaking openness. These are rigorous and exacting poems, that dare to go to some of the darkest places and interrogate a bare language to speak out with truthful precision.
These poems may be stripped down, intense and utterly frank, but they are not without great sincerity and beauty; Sluman writes of the heady cocktail of being alive, where loss, love, sex, close shaves with mortality and the sharp narratives of pain and suffering are written in crystal-clear and humane clarity.