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Billy Mills reviews The Architecture of Chance

Billy Mills is a poet, editor and publisher currently based in Limerick. A contributor to The Guardian, he also frequently reviews books on various publications as well as on his blog Elliptical Movements - where in a post titled 'Poets Abroad' he recently considered The Architecture of Chance alongside books by Robert Peake and Lucy Furlong.

Mills notes the shift in compositional emphasis between Spitting Out the Mother Tongue ("on the basis of his previous book ... he is [also] one of the most interesting of the younger Irish poets of the moment") and The Architecture of Chance, but is ambivalent about the more conceptual or process-based elements in the book, while conceding that "it is gratifying to see younger poets in Ireland who are willing to take the risk of experimentation in this area". Concluding, with the resulting texts as the focus of his consideration, that some of the "procedural" poems work better than others, he moves on to observe that "the real strength of this collection lies in Makris’ apparently non-procedural handling of fractured lyric, a mode that he inhabits more fully".

My thanks to Billy Mills for his positive disposition towards my work, and for his attention to the book.

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