Transitional Spaces is concerned with inner lives and the secret doings of damage and repair. Touching on politics, sickness, sex, art, global warming and the messages of fantasy and dream, it looks at the lost and the longed-for, and at what happens when the bonds between us rupture. Nature appears as mirror, pointer or consolation. Creativity is explored in lines that include poets, a painter, a pattern-cutter and tapestry-maker, but also in our instinctual methods of surviving trauma. Behrens does not attempt an answer, rather she maps the trackways of feeling.
‘Never less than accomplished, never less than intriguing, the poems exhibit the kind of empirical and aesthetic care which distinguishes the best of the contemporary poetry written in the tradition that’s taken William Carlos Williams’ infamous remark ‘no ideas but in things’ as one of its key starting points’—The High Window
‘Behrens here delivers an often shockingly good performance loaded with wild, unexpected insight and innovation in modes of thought and language’— Empty Mirror
