Glass Is Elastic

Jon Glover

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781847771148
• eBook ISBN: 9781847776372
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Glass is Elastic is a book of surfaces and reflections, mirrors and windows. What do we see - what do we know - in a world experienced through lenses and screens? 'Don't blink. Nobody's / looking, nobody's seeing.' Jon Glover explores the treachery and creativity inherent in the eye's lens, in the eyeball itself, in a microscope or camera, in a telescope, in the mysterious properties of glass, malleable as time itself. We translate the shape of the world into maps, pixels, mathematical data; into stories that change in the telling. A central poem sequence links medicine, war and vision in the glass slides assembled in a pathology lab for research into narcolepsy after the First World War, nerves and brains laid bare as evidence, as names on a war memorial. In language that combines scientific rigour with the supple everyday, Glover surprises the reader into looking, into seeing the connections in a beautiful, frightening world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Hand It On
• Mercator’s Projection
• National Grid
• Minute
• Don’t Go There
• Whithorn
• First Impressions and After
• Nothing Brighter or More Blank
• Evidence
• With Verbs
• Cold Gets Inside
• Breath
• Would It Were
• Re-Hanging the Pictures
• Narcolepsy
• Intravenous
• Brooklyn Bridge to the BQE
• And Personal
• Not That Great Expanding
• Today’s Last Site
• Key-Cutting
• Life
• Chewing Apple
• Inaudible, I Don’t Think
• Presentations
• The Cutlery Trade
• The Optician’s Shop Window
• Timing Playtime
• Slide Rule
• Two Childhood Sonnets
• Electric
• Hard Covered
• Gardens or Craters
• Looking at the Matterhorn, Honestly
• Snowfall
• The Road Was
• Icicles
• On Adelphi Street
• The End
• The War of 1812 Again
• Solder
• Classwork
• Bathing Sites on the Niagara River
• Gateways
• Dr Johnson Out and About
• Touring
• Getting to Staffa
• Steam Engines
• Back Story
• Gardening
• Macular Degeneration
• If and Only If
• Theorem
• A Narrative
• In the Late
• Today
• Tangent
• The Car Rolls Over and Out
• Euclid
• Divide the Years Down to Seconds
• Glass Is Elastic
• Generosity
• Shining
• Forsythia
• Disposables
• Tears
• Cut-Out
• Silence
• Nerve Fibres
• Note
• Sleeping Sickness, Narcolepsy and the ‘Narcolepsy’ sequence of poems
• About the Author
• Also by Jon Glover from Carcanet Press
• Copyright