Mirrorball (Paperback or Softback)

What are those distorted smears of colour in the mirror ball? Are they people? Look closer. Yes. They are people. They are us. And there am I, a small pink smudge, an arched eyebrow ... or perhaps not: retinal overload, a trick of the light. How do people make sense of themselves, and what do those splintered shafts of vari-coloured liquidity have to tell us about the skins they are bouncing off? Who knows. The speaker of these lines is himself caught up in the glare, garrulous in spite of the din. Mirrorball collects poems from 2004 to 2018.

"There's a naked honesty that never becomes self-absorbed 'confessional' poetry. I can't think of any other poet now who has pulled this off with such force and immediacy, and also, not forgetting, a nice wit and self-mockery for all our foolishnesses. The poems put the reader on the spot, ask the questions, but in no direct clunky way ... All the poems near conversations but more than that." --Lee Harwood, from a letter

John Muckle is a poet, critic and fiction writer. He is the author of five books of fiction, including the novels London Brakes (Shearsman, 2010), My Pale Tulip (Shearsman, 2012) and Falling Through (Shearsman, 2017). His critical work includes Little White Bull: British Fiction in the Fifties and Sixties (Shearsman, 2014). His first full-length poetry collection, Firewriting and Other Poems appeared from Shearsman in 2005, a late follow-up to It Is Now As It Was Then (with Ian Davidson, Mica Press/Actual Size, 1983). In the eighties he created the Paladin Poetry imprint and was general editor of its flagship anthology, The New British Poetry (eds. D'Aguiar, Allnutt, Edwards, Mottram, 1988). He has been for some fifteen years a regular contributor to PN Review as reviewer and essayist. He lives in London, and works as a teacher.