Ghosts in the Machine

Ghosts in the Machine is a CentreHouse Press parallel text, poems in English alongside Angela D'Ambra's translations into Italian.

'Peter Cowlam's bi-lingual English-Italian collection of poetry, Ghosts in the Machine | Spettri nel maccanismo, is a finely wrought act of introspective minimalism. Structured predominantly as short-lined couplets, they range from imagistic meditations to intellectual and physical explorations.

'Cowlam's phrase-making is tight and succinct, his images sharp-focused and expansive - all embedded "in a foam of script" that is wise and cautionary.... This fine poetry volume needs to be read in the quiet of one's own privacy - and rereading them offers further pleasure, as one peels and plucks life's underlying layers and textures, unearthing "the lines of the ghostly // other me."'

-Sudeep Sen, author of Anthropocene (Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize Winner)

'In these short poems, Peter Cowlam emerges as a poet-observer with his incisive art of suggestive narratives leaving mystic, but not perplexing, impressions. The pictures linger as afterimages. If Poe's art of suggestive leads readers to complex challenges, than Cowlam's offers a quite illusive and allusive simplicity. The readers are left with uncertain awe.'

-Yogesh Patel, MBE