‘I perplex other people... I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself’: as if to echo Socrates’ words, David Spittle’s poems make us look for what, inside language, we did not necessarily know we were looking for. In each poem, precariously poised as Spittle is between syntactical newness and each free act of the mind, he purges us of our anticipation of what the creative act is. Thus, in the same manner as John Ashbery, whose poetry came to him ‘in fits and starts and by indirection’, Spittle’s poetry reveals itself behind the multiple (and mostly involuntary) disguises that reality for him, from one poem to the next, takes on. Hence we find a poet writing always amid the struggle of birth and re-birth, identity and non-identity, a poetry testing itself perilously at the frontiers of both verbal experiment and perception.
