Rob Miles throws light into many mirrors to illuminate the twilit world of Dimmet. With great delicacy, he picks out the gleaming detail, from the iris of an owl, 'uploading data/to the moon' to 'the shimmer of her coat, that golden/retro sheen'. Throughout this collection, there is a sense of watchfulness, watching out, being watched. The poems also 'listen as if listening like a mouse/for what is inaudible to most, but is/in fact, that tireless siren song/of the unsprung spring/of a trap'. In the turn of a line the innocuous image can slide into threat: 'We got on like a house on fire, a home/ablaze'. Through it all, the moon appears and reappears, ancient, new, the eternal Watcher, who keeps coming back to check if we are coming, or if we are still here. This is a beautiful book.
- Imtiaz Dharker
The word 'dimmet' means twilight, and these beautifully spare and spacious lyrics have a glimmering, half-seen quality. The poems make us want to draw close and listen carefully. Alongside, there is wit a-plenty and a deep-felt humanity which can't help noticing and relishing the ordinary and sometimes comical business of being human. I loved Miles's metaphors which are marvellously fresh and bold without being stagey; a bonfire is 'a throng of wood', and a spider a 'brittle stylus' of itself. I will never be able to think of puffins other than as 'whole shelves of Clarice Cliff/flying from cliffs...'. These are poems of great precision and delicacy - with exactly the correct amount of panache!
- Katharine Towers
As a poet, Rob Miles is something of a magician. His poems often begin with apparently everyday situations - a door burning on a bonfire, a neighbour calling down a stairwell - and move through short spaces, but lead us always to somewhere astonishing. How on earth did we get here? a reader of Dimmet might ask, and the answer is by the poet's boundless imagination and absolute precision with language.
- Jonathan Edwards
A poet of great depth and compassion who understands the paradox in our need to connect with others and the innate solitariness of the human condition. In Dimmet, there is a sense of doors opening and closing as meaning shifts and falters, and a translator's intense engagement with language combined with a strong visual sense, which give the poems a marvellously unexpected, cinematic quality: the moon is a 'floating speck on the retina/of the world'; puffins become 'whole shelves of Clarice Cliff'; a spider is 'the bones of a tent/with its top whipped off.' Fire sparks, fades, flickers and burns through the poems, often flaring into epiphanies, giving the reader a sense of constant anticipation and surprise. Every page is like turning a corner and witnessing a miracle.
- Jenny Lewis
The prodigious talent of Rob Miles is full in view throughout his remarkable new collection, which ranges widely, ringing the changes on themes of love and loss, place, time, and memory. Whether he is writing about humans, animals, or the land, this very contemporary poet writes freshly, testing the boundaries between self and other. Angry, tender, playful, and at all times empathetic, his poems surprise with their twists and turns of mood and perspective. His command of language and free verse is sure-footed: he keeps line, stanza and metre alive with shifting emotion. Robert Frost urged his readers to 'Listen for the sentence sounds. If you find some of those not bookish, caught fresh from the mouths of people, some of them striking, all of them definite and recognizable...you know you have found a writer.' Rob Miles bears out the truth of Frost's observation, in authentic poetry which is both subtle and accessible. The best collection of contemporary poetry I have read in a long while.
- Lucy Newlyn
