Tripping Over Clouds issues a bold challenge to Ezra Pound’s maxim to ‘go in fear of abstractions’. Underpinning this is a re-imagining of abstraction as a prior state of possibility from which the world and ourselves are constantly re-emerging—as abstraction to, not from. Both philosophical and fresh, the poetry dances across, off and back into the page, like the mountain runner in its opening section: ‘to talk about / the pleasure principle / of falling downhill fastly.’ Lucy Burnett’s second collection ranges from the hills, to questions of love, and responses to twentieth century abstract art. It ends with poems which ask what identity can mean any longer in the current political climate. Tripping Over Clouds marks the consolidation of an original voice in British poetry. This is poetry about, and of, beauty.
