A Full Cone

A Full Cone is Miles Champion’s second Carcanet collection. Its poems, the fruit of four years’ happy scooping, come in both prose and verse flavours. Champion’s lines are delightful and delighted. One detects between them the poet’s own laughter, his appetite for surprise: "The phrase ball of worsted is interesting," begins one poem, exemplifying their mode. It is a body of work full of "sentient folds," to borrow a phrase from the poems, a collection whose subjects include warmth, compression, plasticity, doubt, flatness, socks, and fun. And somehow Champion’s hook emerges from those abstract waters with very real, very shiny fish.

He is, to boot, an aficionado of the poem title. Highlights include "Miles Ate His Yo-Yo," "We Have Triangles," "The Beige Suprematist," "The Seedless Eyebrow Pencils," "Fruit Shadows," "Sweating Cubism Out," and "Crabs R Back.".