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The Art of Walking

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The Art of Walking

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Sonia Overall
(Shearsman Books)
, 2015

This is a fabulous collection of poems for everyone interested in walking; the affects, sensibilities and the bodies.

It does what it says on the tin. These are poems for and about a performed walking. There are poems of quiet psychogeographical reflection; in a cafe, in a town closed for the day – “You were looking for a September Revolution but ended up with pigeons” – but in others Sonia Overall engages directly with the walk and walking. Her ‘Margate, 5th May’ in which she strolls a Hamish Fulton exhibition embraces Fulton’s asceticism and then explodes it. Her poems can be plundered for instructions – “begin wherever the arrow falls”, “walk to empty your head. Walk to fill it” – and for premonitions of where these offers will take you: “you begin to understand the vastness, the space of the shell and the space beyond the shell”.

Buy this book for one poem alone – ‘inverted’ – it is a classic of anti-normative ambulation. There is a hint of its power early in the collection when Overall invites us to “walk as if your feet were lungs” , but in this poem she delivers a shocking metamorphosis which, on reading, left me physically affected, a provocation to walk unhumanly in this ‘most human’ of actions: 
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“Your fused calves are an arching whip above your torso. Your pointed feet are a hovering scorpion sting.” 
Pass the word along.

CrabMan




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