'Poetry and the Trace is a compelling collection of critical essays by poets and scholars, offering fresh and teasing reflections on the art of contemporary poetry. As the volume’s title declares, poetry is enmeshed with ‘the trace’, Derrida’s ‘mark of the absence of a presence’. The trace: glimpsed in the haunting evanescence of poetry, its quicksilver breath, its collisions between desire and melancholy, between memory and loss. The trace is poetry’s musicality, its dance between distance and intimacy. ' (Publication summary)
