COVODES (Paperback)

This is a sequence of nineteen experimental odes. The sequence offers a documentation of the last year in the form of a fragmented, multi-perspectival 'public voice' poetry. With its roots in the socio-historical context of the pandemic - from stripped supermarket-shelves or clapping for the NHS workers through to the Trump presidency and the closure of Philip Green's Arcadia - the sequence opens onto post-apocalyptic, dystopian fantasies. The locations range from warehouses on the Essex estuary and deserted university campuses to barbecues in Portland and bush-fires in Australia, registering the new awareness of the fragility of supply chains and a larger awareness of climate catastrophe. At the same time, the sequence also explores the experience of lockdown through the evocation of a series of enclosed spaces as if the experience of Covid were a bunker, a submarine, a space-station, a colony on Mars, while also attending to the necessarily mediated experiences produced by lockdown and the corresponding reliance on the technologies of video-conferencing, Instagram, zoom.