Matt Chamberlain

The Echo Chamber Matt Chamberlain

Two poets mulling over project ideas found themselves drawn to David Bowie's early-career method of song-writing. Suppose they too abandoned planning and instead allowed ideas to attack, embrace or bounce off each other? With an opening poem plucked out of the sky, subsequent poems would be stimulated by what went before, but loosely and unevenly so. Concepts would be repeated and themes subverted and, as the book progressed, ideas would repeat and reverberate, layers would develop and perspectives would change and maybe change back. A story might just emerge. It might just go somewhere - or nowhere. In the event, it roamed far but ended up back somewhere close to the place where it had started. Welcome to The Echo Chamber, where one writer provides beautiful lyrical, anchoring poems and the other flies away with powerful concepts and glides on curious thermals. Steeped in metaphor and mixing reality and unreality, autobiographical and fictional, these forceful-yet-sensitive poems never jostle or compete; they feed each other. Beginning and ending with midnights, the book wakes quietly but clashes and clangs in crescendo. Take your torch into the Chamber; hear the notes; see the colours; taste the brewed berries and observe the many deaths.