**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE**
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE SEAMUS HEANEY FIRST COLLECTION PRIZE**
''Fresh, urgent, alive... genius'' PATIENCE AGBABI
This assured and arresting first collection moves deftly and with purpose into private, hidden places - a locked shed, the dark of a battery farm, a murky riverbed, a late-night bar - to show, unflinchingly and in cinematic detail, what we might otherwise choose not to see. Sight is both a gift and curse, of course: given or taken away in poems of windows and curtains, torches and blindfolds, and yet here - following in the tradition of Oswald and Heaney - each image is freshly minted through a cool, objective eye.
Every poem seeks to inhabit those seemingly small but pivotal moments which have monumental, sometimes mortal, consequences. For Pajak, time is fluid: a blink can be ''slow as an eclipse'', our lifetimes are fleeting, our deaths often lingering and seldom peaceful or painless.
Vivid
