LIMINAL
Michael Lee Rattigan
Rufus books, September 2012

*

‘Poetry’, wrote Octavio Paz, ‘is the other voice. Not the voice of history or of anti-history, but the voice which, in history, is always saying something different’. He was of course talking of what is re-created in silence, beyond History and of what governs its conversations and logical discourse. Michael Lee Rattigan also is seeking to pinpoint that ‘other’ voice, for everything that he writes it seems exists only to advance silence, or at least our unmediated access to it—while consciousness is no more than a fine vessel of flesh and blood stretched over the diaphanous musculature of each word; for this poet does not produce a merely verbal language, no, rather he is writing the syntax of listening, the anti-aesthetics of un-naming and sucking back into the lungs the protean impulse of a visible mind. In this collection, Rattigan is in many ways attempting to cross what the French poet Philippe Jaccottet described as ‘the unique uncrossable space’, that which constitutes our ‘elsewhere’, the incongruously familiar place that occurs when our reality-horizons are wheeled out of the mind. It is in fact the logocentric destination that a writer like Rattigan would like one day to return from.
Paul Stubbs

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