Dust Sheet

Synopsis

Whisked away like an illusionist's cape or shaken out in the street, Dust Sheet throws off a cloud in which the world is made strange.

Here, the everyday is perpetually on the point of tipping over into mystery: a disused phone box becomes a portal, a cup of coffee swims with visions, a discarded surgical glove points towards a parallel reality.

Here, people are driven by their obsessions: drinking rainwater with a fork or trying to formulate a new theory of everything.

In this universe, imaginary figures – the contrarian, the imperfectionist – exist alongside the marginal of history – the Renaissance artist Piero di Cosimo and the Dutch biologist Jan Swammerdam.

Informed by philosophy, with a lyric sensibility and an appetite for formal variety, the poems in Dust Sheet seek to restore and re-enchant the overlooked.

Praise for this Book

‘Luke Heeley's poems are extraordinarily active. They seethe with a myriad subtle distortions and teeter on breathless cusps and brinks. The images morph and interlock, moving from the particular to the abstract and back again. But it is the character of these poems – a strange fusion of the delicate, the confidential, the obsessive, the impersonal and the innocent – that is completely beguiling, and gives this collection its satisfying wholeness.’ —Annie Freud

‘Luke Heeley’s poems give life to the enchantment of the familiar. His eye for detail is immaculate, his ear for language impeccable. Dust Sheet introduces Heeley as one of the deftest and sharpest poets of his generation.’ —David Morley

‘Heeley's musicality immediately draws you in – this is the real thing – but the melancholy, the quality of light and the sudden filmic flashes of surreal brilliance will sustain you throughout Dust Sheet and leave you impatient for his next collection.’ —Luke Kennard