Infused with
movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built
environment, celebrating places where ‘the bridges are endless / beyond the
cantilever / of reality’. Each poem is its own event: expansive in scope but
intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S.
Eliot’s Waste Land in his strange, compelling
descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner
swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet
is genius loci, the spirit of the place.
From Manhattan’s ‘silky
streets’ and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native
Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on
the cusp of things.