The Poetry of Destroyed Experience
These poems do not protest inhumanity as much as think it through: they want to understand it, and can only do so by going through it. Because this thinking takes place as poetry, it challenges the alienated forms of rationality that destroy emphatic experience in the first place; yet it does not simply rail against destruction but explores its aesthetic — and by extension repressed political — potentials. Like Marx’s, Sutherland’s romanticism is anti-romantic: the nature he is after is not the one we have destroyed but the one that does not yet exist.
Mathew Abbott reviews Keston Sutherland‘s The Odes to TL61P