Tripping Over Clouds

Tripping Over Clouds issues a bold challenge to Ezra Pound's maxim to 'go in fear of abstractions'. Underpinning this is a re-imagining of abstraction as a prior state of possibility and potential from which the world and ourselves are constantly re-emerging - as abstraction to, not from. Both philosophical and fresh, the poetry trips off and back onto the page, like the fellrunner in its opening section: 'to talk about / the pleasure principle / of falling downhill fastly'. Lucy Burnett's second collection explores how we fetch up with the world in all its variety, difficulty and beauty, ranging across encounters with mountains, love, contemporary politics and visual art. Ultimately this is a poetry which asserts hope, and playfulness, as strategies for navigating an inherently changeable sense of now.

Lucy Burnett is from south-west Scotland, and in recent years has been based in the north of England. She currently lives in Cockermouth, where she gets out in the fells at every opportunity, and works as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Cumbria. Previously she has worked at Leeds Beckett, Salford and Strathclyde Universities, and before that as an environmental campaigner for organisations including Ramblers Scotland, and Friends of the Earth. Apart from writing and academia, she is a photographer, a keen fellrunner and recently completed climbing the Scottish Munros. Her website can be found at: www.lucyburnett.net.