Glass is Elastic

Glover Jon

"Glass is Elastic" is a book of surfaces and reflections, mirrors and windows. What do we see – what do we know – in a world experienced through lenses and screens? "Don't blink. Nobody's / looking, nobody's seeing". Jon Glover explores the treachery and creativity inherent in the eye's lens, in the eyeball itself, in a microscope or camera, in a telescope, in the mysterious properties of glass, malleable as time itself. We translate the shape of the world into maps, pixels, mathematical data; into stories that change in the telling.

A central poem sequence links medicine, war and vision in the glass slides assembled in a pathology lab for research into narcolepsy after the First World War, nerves and brains laid bare as evidence, as names on a war memorial.

In language that combines scientific rigour with the supple everyday, Glover surprises the reader into looking, into seeing the connections in a beautiful, frightening world.

About the Author

Jon Glover was born in Sheffield in 1943 and grew up in south London. He studied English and Philosophy at the University of Leeds, where he met Jon Silkin and began a long association with Stand magazine, of which he is now Managing Editor. Jon Glover is an Honorary Fellow of the English Association, an Honorary Fellow of the School of English at the University of Leeds and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bolton, where he is Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing.

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