AS GRASS BECOMES FLESH

After Hiraeth, in which Michael Lee Rattigan sought to uncover the palimpsest of his most elusive thoughts and ideas, we now find him writing poems that appear to dissociate themselves from their author; for each poem is the result of an inclination, not necessarily a literary decision. If the poems feel like the shifting of thought within thought, then this is because Rattigan believes, like Bergson before him, that the mind does indeed ‘overflow the intellect’; thus, this poet never allows his ideas to be contiguous, set side by side on a single plain of consciousness, but rather he prefers to shape poems from the very flux of his intuition.