The poems in this collection speak in many voices and touch on many themes: COVID-19, love and loss, uncertainty, well-being, migration, power, violence, nature, superstition, memory, art and faith. They explore connections, separation, nearness and distance in time and space. They feel, with careful fingertips, for the fragile frameworks and interpretations we construct to make sense of and protect our equally fragile landscapes and lives. Often written in formal poetic forms - fragile frameworks themselves, perhaps - the poems remind us that we are each subject to the specific but fluid and interconnected circumstances of our time and place.
"Phil Vernon once again invites us to bear witness in a collection with characteristic poise and gravitas. The narrative voices through these crafted poems have clarity and intent, counterbalanced with enough nuance to allow the reader to read between the lines. There's no subject that Vernon cannot tackle: from the immediacy of watching the moon landing to a Covid poem through the partial lens of Camus. His poetry explores fear: from the looming threat of war, the horrors of female genital mutilation, to climate change, toxic masculinity and modern poverty to more personal poems. Form, metre and rhyme do not constrain Vernon's poetry; rather, they allow the poems to appear seamless, marrying a traditional approach to poetry with one that is fresh and distinctive reflecting contemporary concerns. An illuminating collection for our times."- Matthew M. C. Smith, writer. Editor of Black Bough Poetry.
"With unflinching honesty and compassion, Phil Vernon invites us to contemplate the significance of absences: neglected spaces in urban landscapes; hidden forces and lost relationships; history's unwritten messages; the musicality of silence. These are poems that sing in perfectly tuned cadences and continue, long afterwards, to resonate in the memory."- Marian Christie, author of Fractal Poems and From Fibs to Fractals
"In Watching the Moon Landing, Phil Vernon peels back the layers of the ordinary, of the everyday, of what we take for granted, to expose what lies beneath: those things we choose to ignore, perhaps because they are too painful to acknowledge, or perhaps because over time we have become too desensitised to notice them. Vernon's beautifully crafted, resonant poems are informed by a sensitivity and deep sense of humanity that challenge the reader to reach out and accept our individual responsibility for others, to act in a way that makes a difference, so that whilst 'nothing has changed... all has changed'."- Nigel Kent, author of Unmuted, Saudade and Psychopathogen
