The underside of this baroque sublime is rococo mannerism. The unhappy consciousness of radiant edgelessness remains edgy, both restless and persistent. This contradictory motility is not resolved dialectically but remains caught within its repetitive inventiveness. The demands on attention are too demanding, while heightened inattention paralyses the possibility of a more knowing expression of the traumatised surface. This oscillation between demanding attention and heightened inattention reveals a contradictory but monotonous ground as the unarticulated support for the polyphonic figurative surface.
Contradictions run deeper than the persistence of the surface can articulate or acknowledge.
This begins to specify the conditions of possibility developed in Wilkinson's poetry. Such conditions cannot be shared or discussed easily, but the poetic specification of such conditions in an immediacy of linguistic tension is remarkable. For those who have yet to experience the quality of Wilkinson's poetry, there really is no time like the present. You can read some poems by Drew Milne in this issue of Jacket. Poems in six books was published by Parataxis in 1994.