An exceptional collection. With deep attention to different kinds of conflict, Angela Graham helps us see how poetry resists what Auden called the “curse” that has to be redeemed, the magnetic pull of violence in human affairs.
Rowan Williams, poet and theologian
Angela Graham’s EXPOSURE manages to do the seemingly impossible: open our desensitised hearts to feel the loss of each life needlessly sacrificed to the futility and brutality of war. Her inspired decision to write the collection in the tradition of photopoetry, but with the photographs deliberately left out, allows language and the reader’s imagination, with devastating emotional accuracy, to capture the careless tragedy of violence − a timely, challenging and beautiful read.
Anne Tannam, Poet in Residence with Poetry Ireland, 2023 −2025
Angela Graham has done something unique and extraordinary in poetry here in managing to find a kind of agency in documentation and tribute. Agency in the face of a hopelessness that it is all too easy to feel in the light of such huge global powerplay. It is a work of conscience and empathy and deserves to be widely read.
Maureen Boyle, Fortnight review
Graham asks us to go into and then to go beyond the simple newspaper or television image. She demands that we react. Because ‘No image / will change the world. / We do that /or not.’ Visceral yet deeply reflective. A remarkable, moving collection where images inspire words that inspire images. Once read, these images can’t be unseen.
Tim Hartley, journalist and author
EXPOSURE testifies ‘Proof in the Form of Images’ and truths of ekphrastic compulsion in which photography’s ‘raw material’ … is media via which, modulated by poetry’s act, ‘something / of someone else’s life can speak / through you’.
Natasha Cuddington, poet
Brilliantly imagined, her poems take us beyond sloganeering to individual portraits of individuals under fire … but even in darkness, Graham seeks ‘the drift of water, the feather-shedding snow … all the gentlenesses’. Her gorgeous lyrical dexterity takes us beyond destruction towards ‘something indestructible’, in which each human life is ‘a living word’. This is nothing less than essential poetry.
Liam Carson, poet
Graham’s specificity makes this work exciting. She zooms in on each scene to isolate its finer details: the steel finish of an armoured vehicle, or the sun setting behind wholesale sheds in Ukraine. Meaning is not imposed but emerges instead through the poet’s careful attention to her subjects … a testament to the role of poetry as witness… rigorous, innovative and thoughtful… marked by moments of profound clarity and beauty.
Nation Cymru review
a remarkable collection of poems that explore war photography with the moral responsibility of a documentary film maker… Humanity tested in extremis is at the collection’s core… this book leaves as permanent an impression as any photograph.
The Morning Star review