Voices from another room

Description

You could speak to me, or not,
and buy an ice cream as you did
on other days beneath blue skies, a
mid the sounds of other lives,
or I could speak, if you preferred,
or neither say a single word.

—

The carefully modulated surface of Stuart Payne’s poems belies the intriguing, startling and thought-provoking depths of thought and perception. Such deliberate tensioning between the obvious and the hidden allows him to craft finely judged poems that reward rereading. Whether evoking the touch of the sun or the sound of an old tape recording, his universe is both vivid and uncertain as past, present and future are considered and reconsidered, and the distance between minds is sensed and explored.

Stuart Payne was born in Cape Town and raised there and in Auckland, New Zealand. He studied English at the University of Cape Town and took French classes at the Alliance Francaise du Cap. Voices From Another Room is his first collection and includes poems published in Stanzas and Carapace. He has three cats.