Stuart McPherson
Poet & Graphic Artist
PRAISE for All Empty Vessels:
Aaron Kent and Stuart McPherson’s All Empty Vessels is a multi-person conversation. Two men in conversation with imagination, language, illness, power and limitation. Back and forth, between the poets — whose friendship is evident in the collaboration — the reader is brought into the intimate space of confession, creativity, chaos and collaboration. This joint collection makes few promises, but the one it demonstrates is that even in emptiness, connection is a companion for All Empty Vessels.
— Pádraig Ó Tuama
This diurnal/nocturnal double act spits and wheezes an electro-magnetic sociology of the underdog spirit with venom and flare. Animated by a summonings or invocation of Edgar Allan Poe and a character named 'Poet', the reader is razed by a wild-card graffiti of the spirit. This is a Butoh of working class robustness/consciousness: a dance of death performed to the British class system, executed on an altar of flickering screens, night walks, radiophonic dead air and luminous introspection. A haunting is bad enough, but a double haunting, where Kent summons McPherson and McPherson responds to Kent, reads like a vigorous card game: the flickering deck of their contaminant thought laid down swiftly, card by card, and without remorse. And yet, there is bathos, tenderness and liminality. In a dual showmanship of a new warning for both past and future, these are 'new forgeries. . . for invisible dawns' housed in a 'coffin rolled across a minefield'. You stand warned.
— MacGillivray
Two poets writing so brilliantly and wearing a full suit of artistic armoury; what’s not to like? Aaron Kent and Stuart McPherson’s poetics are simultaneously interfused and complimentary of one another, befitting a book of exceptionally nuanced, collaborative poems and texts. Open, ludic, tender, defiant and with multiple helpings of satiric wit, nothing appears off limits in these poems of lyric intimacy, cast across psychological (and socio-political) time and space. Kent and McPherson are a pair of shapeshifters, metamorphic, restless, and so continually uncovering and recovering perceptions within a spindled self. Here, hearts become mirrors in a family tree, the ‘I’ orbits ‘delicately as a torpedo on payday’ and desire is haunted ‘with the eyes of a gundog’. Death is cast too, never far away like an eye at the porthole. This metamorphic effect tilts the poem from sea to sky and back down to earth again, ensuring the writing is located at all times, bound by both poet’s perfect-pitch musicianship. All Empty Vessels listens in to the overboiling temperature of the times. This is a bicameral poetics that comes with stark and subtle warnings. Poets too are implicated, everything is at stake—it’s all or nothing, as Jean Genet said it must be. Time to wake up from ‘tone-deaf banjo’ playing and ‘ceremonial bootlicking’, or else ‘the future watches rabbits thrashing in the snares’. Read this and be fully nourished, yet hungry and, as I did, read it all over again.
— James Byrne
PRAISE for End Ceremonies:
This extended collection is distinguished by a measured lyricism and an achieved awareness of the strangeness of our everyday lives. We are in unflinching territory where 'story is written as scar', poetic energy being productively directed as, for example, in a compelling sequence about a totem animal, the bear. Throughout, human and animal presences manifest in both real and mythic dimensions. Most strikingly, the war on the self and with encountered others flares out everywhere in poems that shiver with life and brilliant purpose. In a poetics addressing the implacable forces of existence, the poet seeks to find foothold, to comprehend and endure. Tactile, muscular, possessing a richly-layered sense of the spirit, the imagination is working at full throttle in End Ceremonies; an essential read for all who are concerned with contemporary poems and contemporary issues.
— Penelope Shuttle, Lyonesse
Stuart McPherson’s new collection, End Ceremonies, is a revelatory, elemental, poised, limitless, mysterious, engaging exploration of the self, its world, our world, its dreams and ours and the many-stringed emotional and intellectual responses to it all. Formally adept, a live voice singing it all into being with dispassionate sentiment, exact feeling. Wide-ranging, challenging, kind, attentive, exciting poems, opening wonderfully on the page. You’d better read them. Now.
— Ian Patterson, Shell Vestige Disputed
PRAISE for Obligate Carnivore
Stuart McPherson’s perilous mixture of vulnerability and concealment—like 90s grunge played on one of Cage’s prepared pianos—elicits emotions I didn’t know I possessed. “Something trapped within the hazelnut of its dried open eyes.” I want to crawl in among McPherson’s lines (“A concertina / of rotting cells / strung together”) and behold them, be held by them. Obligate Carnivore is a brutally gorgeous debut.
— Jaydn DeWald, The Rosebud Variations
McPherson has crafted a poetic landscape in which the reader is compelled to travel within. It’s a landscape to be felt and heard, a place where one might find solace. The poems in Obligate Carnivore are like the sound of blood in the ears; it’s a poetry of loss and desire, one that asks of us: “What if we’re more like animals than humans?” I am haunted, mesmerized by the landscape that McPherson paints, the poems he lays open, and feel as though I want to take what’s left.
— U. G. Világos, The Lark Sings Wind
Stuart McPherson’s poems gnaw away at our domestic bones until all that’s left is the sticky detritus of violence, trauma, and the thing we call love. Obligate Carnivore is a wonderful debut collection by a welcome new voice in British poetry.
— Daniele Pantano, Home for Difficult Children