I was rummaging in a bin in Berlin –
     it’s a thing that I did, I liked it –
     when I noticed, under everything, a briefcase.
                   [‘Bin Man’]

     Someday you will be there, in bed with a woman,
     when the telephone rings and it’s your dentist.
     This happens more often the older you get
     and yet it’s never something that is easy to accept.
                   [‘Teeth’]

     The heat was like an elephant in the room: it stood there only adding to the heat.
     We called up New York zoo. When the man asked, Asian? African?, our silence
     must’ve told him all he needed to know.
                   [‘The Apartment’]

     Amy is sitting in bed wearing nothing apart from a monocle
     which she’d picked up for nothing or the next best thing
     in a thrift store and thought of as so very Neue Sachlichkeit
     when Sabrina comes crawling from the closet
                   [‘Monocle’]

     Many things have come to pass which I will never understand,
     not least among them my father who came from outer space
     to find my mother in the corner of a field, milking the cow –
                   [‘The Milkman’]

As one line begets the next, as an image begets a character begets an entire history or future, Andrew Elliott’s poems – many of them proliferating excursions into the hinterlands of 20th-century Germany and America, many involving girls, cars and spaceships by way of paintings, films and books – continually divert and confound the reader; they suggest that there may be pleasures to be had from not seeing the wood for the trees.

Of Andrew Elliott’s previous book, Ciaran Carson wrote: ‘Lung Soup is a tour de force: nearer perhaps to the prose of Thomas Pynchon or Italo Calvino in its play with genre than any poetry I can think of.’

The lines quoted above are examples of how the poems open. For how they continue, you need the book.