Powder on the wind

Plot

owder on the Wind is a thornily haunting, icily penetrating collection that casts its own distinct shadow. Buller's authorial humility is as ever marked by a fascination with other creators' lives - here, Gwen John, Elizabeth Bishop, Walter Sickert among them - paid tribute in figurative miniatures. These poetic portraits take shape either in appreciations of - often unmanageable - talents, or empathetic projections, as if tapping the subjects' after-thoughts on the spiritualist table of the page. Buller is also visited by three Russian poet-spectres: Boris Pasternak - 'Take my life from the shelf and blow its dust away;.../ I'll make the blank page flower if I must.'; Marina Tsvetaeva, spitting metaphors at past slanders - '...that I'm a harlot sprawling/ in a drunken Russia's arms'; and Osip Mandelshtam, who feels as if '...rolled on [the] tongue' of the Red Tsar 'like a berry'. Buller's absorption in the blasted tundra of Russian literature sets a bitingly wintrytone. Mortality's inescapability is sprinkled like permafrost throughout, coldly indefatigable as the mind's tireless instinct to negotiate terms.