Uncle of Cats

'Formally consecutive but radically paratactical, these lines are never let loose portentously to dilate. While Wakeling’s poems may aim to nullify Larkin and bog men, archaeologies of cultural inheritance, neither do the poems’ Japanese intertexts serve any smug distortion from empty mind to Western mindfulness, a ‘porcelain pseudo-history’ glazed with ego delusory in vaunted self-denial.

That’s what these poems offer – old lyric technology turning against its partiality to lull, to wrap up, the poems are fast as ice. I go outside and at the top of the street, it is bitterly cold and at the bottom sweltering, humid. Here is the street, here is the weather at every extreme. Transit becomes transit.' – John Wilkinson