Open Workings

Iain Bamforth's third collection applies carnival licence to various kinds of histories: personal, symbolic, ethnographic, social—even to a history of representations in the 101 epigrams and “autographemes” that make up the Paris sequence “Impediments.” Away from the city, the narratives of patients based on his experience as a country doctor in the south west of Scotland, and the poems set in a mining town in the Australian outback, contribute to the social history of their communities as they examine how far a rural doctor—“a fortunate man” in John Berger's phrase—can negotiate against the sheer weight of common sense.