Abstract
Play Out the Match, Michael Knox's first published collection of poetry, is also an extended meditation on the idea of reconciliation. Vivid and lyrical, the poems make use of various voices, speakers, and landscapes to explore the surreptitious aspects of fear and indifference, tenderness and fragility. In Play Out the Match, dollar store cashiers, Scottish pub brawlers, lovers, and cowards create a broad and sympathetic world of otherness. Shifting viewpoints and lexicons weave across a wide variety of experience and emotion, producing a poetry that is cinematic in its imagery but lucid and accessible in content. In achingly human narratives, Knox examines the finer lines between love and indifference, meaning and loss.