The Lantern Cage

The title of Kelly Grovier’s third collection, The Lantern Cage, conjures contrasting images of illumination and shadow, warmth and confinement, the burning soul and the material body. The poems it brings together are fascinated by a universe whose meaning flickers dimly across the walls of our experience. Prompted by scenes that occur in life’s everyday spaces - city streets and secondhand shops, museum galleries and trains - these are poems that seek to shine a warm light on the mysteries that underlie our existence. This is a world of ‘undeciphered sands’, ‘lost cathedrals’, ‘buried books’, and ‘bone machines’ - a land where substance and shadow blur. By turns lyrical and philosophical, romantic and playful, The Lantern Cage is a collection located on the margins of vision, where the invisible calculations of being (‘algorithms of rain’; ‘the long divisions / of suffering’) remain unsolvable - a realm whose secrets are kept ‘under lough and quay’.