Clutter Jar - by Christopher Horton (Paperback)

About the Book

Christopher Horton's Clutter Jar is a taut, emotionally charged pamphlet that explores masculinity, violence, memory, and technology with formal clarity and restrained lyricism.

Book Synopsis

Christopher Horton's Clutter Jar is a taut, emotionally charged pamphlet that explores masculinity, violence, memory, and technology with formal clarity and restrained lyricism. These poems move between fractured domestic interiors and shifting landscapes, often returning to fatherhood, the erosion of time, and upheaval with a searching, unresolved gaze. Horton's language is spare but deliberate, allowing quiet images to resonate with unease or tenderness. The collection is shaped by what is withheld as much as what is said, attentive to the clutter left behind by silence, collective experience, and the weight of unspoken histories.

Review Quotes

Christopher Horton's imagination takes us flying between worlds, between ideas, from ghosts by the road side, to Pompeii, to Shaoshan, from urban to rural to the cosmic. He is playful in turn ('The many Versions of Brian Eno) as well as socially aware ('Tenancy Decant'), with keen observation and awareness of our increasingly complicated and cluttered world, our minds continually attempting to locate ourselves within it. The sense of time as an illusion is glaringly present in many poems, as is the reflection on sound, through music and the creators of music...This is an interesting and complex collection which deserves to be read.

- Maggie Harris

Nostalgic for what's slipping away yet alert to the unease of modern life, these finely wrought poems capture the weight and subtlety of the everyday with grace and precision.

- Dorothy Lehane

Christopher Horton writes with tenderness and mischief, gathering the odd corners of living into poems that hum with love, loss, and the ordinary miracles of everyday life. These are pages which open doors into kitchens, night buses, city streets and empty dancefloors. They bring their reader into the company of dreamers, gatecrashers, of bees, ghosts, and old lovers. These poems offer their attention to beauty and strangeness and generously illuminate what can be found inside the private rooms of the heart.

- Vanessa Lampert