Ian House’s
writing begins in memory and experience, the
variousness of living, and the tangles of thinking and feeling. As the poems
acquire shape, detail and voice, they become celebrations of beauty and energy,
examinations of cruelty and mortality. Ranging from
Stevens’s blue guitar to a child drawing, from a medieval monk cataloguing
saints’ bones to Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
the new work in Just a Moment: New and
Selected Poems probes the transformations wrought by aging and poetic
creation, exploring the nature of art through a central sequence on the
paintings of Paul Nash. ‘Ian House’s new book is
full of wry, thoughtful, fine lyric poetry. It concerns itself with absence and
elusiveness, age and mortality but is never elusive or lacking in vigour. His
poetic voice is fluent with anger, passion, hope and resounding clarity’—Sasha Dugdale From reviews of Nothing’s Lost (2014): ‘These poems invigorate the imagination, inviting
the reader to join in their verbal aerobics. Like the peregrine, House can
“strip life / to the bone like poetry”’—The North ‘House’s eye is clearly focused and his ear
finely attuned. Like MacNeice he revels in “the drunkenness of things being
various”’—London Magazine