Books Noted: Macgregor Card, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary

The debut collection by Macgregor Card is a book that leaps and swerves through countries and times. It bounds through and on language, repetition, and inversions forging a path into sophisticated surprise. Martin Corless-Smith says: "there is at times a kind of joy, but I had to come back to this time and again to make sure I wasn't just reading craziness, but in the end of course I was, but a beautiful sustained outpouring...Here the song drives the engine and finds often quite brilliant solutions." Card writes:

I am climbing a tree too high for words whose leaves are as green as they ought to be

Card's words reach as high into the strange and unsayable.