Front Matter

Front Matter takes its name from publishing — the pages before the real thing begins: copyright, dedication, contents. Tim Dale turns the term inside out, asking what it means to take the ordinary seriously on its own terms. Moving through five sections, from origins and inheritance, through grief and landscape, into the interior weather of daily life, sixty-four poems attend to the texture of a life lived between things. Between countries and classes. Between what we mean to say and what gets said. Formally various, quietly unsparing, and written with an eye for the moment when the mundane tips into the true, Front Matter is the secular half of a larger conversation. The sacred comes later. These are the things that needed saying first.