Profiles
‘An eye either side’
In Fabian Peake’s 1998 poem "The Search," the speaker is looking for someone ‘in the trees behind the mist’ and ‘in the night around the windows.’ Two features of this search strike me as useful when considering Peake’s career as a poet-artist in the tradition of Hans Arp or Paul Klee. Not only does the seeker take pleasure in his failure to discover the object of his desire—‘I expect and want you to hide’— but he seems uncertain that it really exists, at least in any conventional sense. This quarry must be sought for ‘where I think you’ll never be … [on] the other side of invention.’