Damian Garside

Zero Gravity Damian Garside

My poetry covers a great range in verbal style, tone and subject matter. It is often markedly ironic and/or satirical, particularly when dealing with social or political issues. The poetry also tends to want to explore spiritual and/or philosophical questions, and can be seen to reflect the poet's English ancestry (and literary heritage), his sense of the history and changing political landscape of South Africa, and to raise the great conundrums regarding the place of human beings in a cosmos that science is revealing is far stranger than we thought, perhaps stranger than we ever could have imagined. Lastly, the poems - particularly those written over the last few years - can show a somewhat playful, even irreverent, attitude to the idea of poets and poetry that we can characterize as "postmodern" but which - for all their playfulness and reference to popular culture - raise concerns about the future of poetry and the human values with which poetry has always strongly identified, in our globalized, mass-media world of the sound bite and the visual image.