If the Mute Timer by Tom Docherty Ruby Robinson ensuring the poems’ unflinching honesty

ensuring the poems’ unflinching honesty

they are less about physical union and completeness and more about fracture and distance: tender

but he doesn’t mind too much

such as those offered by radical but sidelined figures in the English Civil War

If the Mute Timer by Tom Docherty Ruby Robinson ensuring the poems’ unflinching honestyTom Dochertys first collection, If the Mute Timber, begins not with a book nor even an attentive ear, but with the elusive fragment of its title. The poems situate themselves in medias res: among birds or gravestones, between lines of prayer, in the flux of appearances. Places without words become focal points: the poems seek articulation in life before birth and after death; in animal and imagined lives; in works of music, painting, and architecture;