Exit Strategy

Examining grief and art, these poems create a tender, liminal space where there is time - infinite time - for understanding the flawed, lovely, terrifying state of being human. This is an ambitious and brilliantly achieved collection from a writer of great talent.

- Helen Mort

Patrick Wright is one of those rare poets who can translate the complex images of visual artists into precise and pitch-perfect language, creating a shared vision between the two art forms. His choice of contemporary subjects (Idris Khan, Rachel Whiteread, Cornelia Parker), as well as artists of a previous generation (Van Gogh, Bruegel, Malevich, Turner) spans the wide history of art. But these are more than poems responding to paintings, these are manifestos on how we might learn to look and comprehend, to quote Wright: 'how the blind might see the world / if the gift of sight were suddenly returned.'

- Tamar Yoseloff

'Beyond the argon and plexiglas I know of another cold room.' Through a series of encounters with modernist artworks, the poems in Exit Strategy attempt to navigate a world fractured by grief after the death of a partner. Abstract, sometimes actively resistant, the artworks - like the universe itself - offer no easy consolations: 'The sea has no reply---& I'm devastated'. Rather, they are partners in an ongoing conversation, the poems written not only 'after' but 'alongside' or 'before' the artworks, working with them to try to give sense and shape to loss: 'I'm left stranded this side, tasked with redrawing the lines'. Drawing on philosophy, physics and religious texts alongside modernist art, and experimenting with a range of innovative poetic forms, this collection is an intriguing exploration of our various 'ways of seeing', but it's also one rooted deeply in experience of loss and love - 'let's proceed with tenderness', the poet reminds us, or perhaps himself. End or beginning, the poet asks; the answer, of course, is neither and both: 'If the universe is infinite, I just need to learn to travel far enough.'

- Helen Tookey

In these profound and moving poems, Patrick Wright takes us deep into an exploration of personal grief. Exit Strategy calls upon philosophers, artists, God, angels and theoretical physicists to help give shape to loss, to address the ineffable. Where do the dead go; what is reality; what is beyond the visible and what if the dead want to stay dead? This book is a triumph - it finds form for the unthinkable.

- Helen Ivory