A collection by a poet who is not a poet but the writer of a poem, an experiment of personas and online journals of the emerging poet. Not as a masked pretender but as an actor of the cosmic light, a vessel of the poem’s greater work. Almost political and yet the lay life on display and glorified. 

Rhyme to bounce the piem onwards. A sense of a journey. Play with vowels some poems concentrate on broad some slender some benders – for the mind. 

The introduction does a good job of setting the scene of experiments through the creation of an altered poet. The poems are more than poems and remind me of a deck of cards, seemingly random phrases that are woven tightly with a narrative.

Sexton and Salmon play with poetics of the Irish Wisdom Tradition in an urgent, innovative surreal fashion. With poems like All the Things Jesus Never Ate until after Easter, rhyme, and wordplay we see a sophisticated poet at work pretending to be an emerging poet and, to paraphrase – waisting his poems through online publication. Sexton’s Future Pass is the poetry of a poet never born, a pseudo poet that only exists when written or read.

Published by Salmon Poetry, an Irish press. Review by Michelle Moloney King for Beir Bua Press.

Salmon’s website is fantastic also – they give author details, blurbs and a preview. I am impressed. (The actual audacity of me, a two year old poet with no academia in writing or even English (all science and then teaching) saying that I am impressed by one of Ireland’s cornerstone presses is gas – but I live to be gas before ash.)