Brain Fugue is as inventive and playful as we’ve come to expect from this glorious poet: pulling as she does English poems from inside of a French mind, equally at home or estranged in England or France. Claire can bring concepts, ideas and feeling to life with phrase after startling turn of phrase. She can play with form to create new and exciting ways of placing words on the page. But as with much play, things can quite easily tip into becoming a more serious kind of struggle. The struggle to feel settled – to understand – and finally, the struggle to find some kind of inner peace. Because lively energy and brilliance can also speak of the frantic attempt to find solutions that are never quite within reach.
This complex, multi-layered pamphlet of poems speaks of the complexity of the human mind as much as it does the complicated mind of this poet. Brain Fugue is an astonishing piece of work.