For Display Purposes Only

These poems pause for the spectacle: cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides. Making fun of consciousness, they describe a system of tripwires, pitfalls and decoys that this notion of daily viewership entails. These poems are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, where the act of living becomes more and more like watching a film in which we play no role.

'Whip-pan-smart, fleet and protean, David Seymour's poems seem to contain the speed of the age. I love their ranginess and ambition, the way they rove through a here-and-now teeming with there-and-then, their speakers' flights and turnings through the blizzard. This is a different world, and we live in it.' – Paul Farley

'From an unemployed Scot in mid-gripe to a photo double floating in a shooting tank, Seymour places us in the domains of various carefully considered strangers "made coherent by reason," but also by an energized curiosity and a humane amusement. Worlds only notionally, minimally there – worlds belonging to whoever briefly inhabits and dreams them – become fully dimensioned, clearly edged under his attention. It's uncanny how he pulls this off. David Seymour is a magician.' – Tim Lilburn