Elemental and compelling, Arthur Seefahrt’s Decay Studies are poems both Sapphic in being fragmentary and Giacomettic in being eroded, emptied, brought to structural essence.
The time in these poems is their own attentive present, cinematic in that they mark points along a succession. Seefahrt’s poems are in fact more than poems, they instigate a language-based laboratory, a way of being close to poiesis-in-process, giving witness to something like private loss of energy inside a ritual, or radioactive decay within the poetic artefact.
The final, sustained sequences in this book are time-lapse accounts of the unreliability of textual material and demonstrate Seefahrt as an innovator of form, unafraid to lose what the poems are made of. The accumulative effect is one of catching a volatile continuum in action, and there is remarkable beauty in these aftermaths of disappearance to where poems started.
With no need of recovery, there is a futural gesture, a posit that great poems can be made of – and become – almost no-thing. It is such risk, and the care in demonstration, that no-thing here becomes focussed as the subject of this remarkable debut.
—Sean Borodale, author of Bee Journal and Inmates