Inman: what they say

P. Inman’s poetry resembles a folded and pleated cloth or skin that has been dipped in printer’s ink then dragged across impacted, boulder-strewn terrain—a landscape bounded to the north by new music (that area where jazz and contemporary classical meet), to the east by Abstract Expressionism (long before the money showed up), to the south by economic and social systems, and to the west by family and literary relations. It is work that has long fulfilled a particular need better than any other, and with the bulk of what Inman has written to date now collected in these pages, we can more easily see how his constancy of focus over decades has yielded such variously astonishing results. One wonders how this admirably egoless writing manages to be so densely peopled; rarely has the thickness of words been milled to such denominated fineness. Miles Champion