Close your eyes to make
it large, larger, largest. Someone can see it
and put it on film, so like a picture, so like an echo
attracting and repelling across what you can only
imagine as noise in a vast cathedral dome, knocking
for a door, logged in your head, wordless.

                                        from ‘Magnetic Resonance Imaging’

In hospital for a scan, Jon Glover became fascinated by the ways in which Magnetic Resonance Imaging creates pictures of the hidden processes of the nervous system. It could express what is already written within the human body, in all organic life and the earth itself. Whether in the hospital scanner or the vast particle accelerators exploring the fabric of the universe in laboratories deep underground in Geneva, the process of making atoms collide to reveal new meanings tells a story, written in the brain, on the walls of a cave, in a poem. The poems in Magnetic Resonance Imaging grew out of an enforced awareness of the fragility of the human body; they grow into an understanding of the indestructible force of the imaginative energy that constantly rearranges existing elements into new forms.


Cover image Half of the CMS inner tracker barrel, part of the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, Geneva. Photograph copyright CERN. Cover design by StephenRaw.com.

Table of Contents

Upstate Again


Came Back   
Coal Bags   
Bullet or Fossil   
Darkrooms: In the Box   
I Thought of Pretty   
Wing   
You’re Gone; Like Ears   
Blemish   
Dare Like Dead   
Driving Down   
The Beautiful Machines   
More Trash   
Risk   
Site   
Snakes Again   
Themselves Dry   
Walking, Not Waking   
Way Through   
Olana   

Seeing As


Something Like   
Ancient Lost Poems   
Flying The   
Oh, Crying This  
The Sun Rocking   
Caen   
Caen and York   
Arms   
Button Box   
Duty Free   
The Function of Dreams   
Instruments    
Postwar   
The Study Floor   
Watch on Deck   


The MS Poems


Back to the Diagnosis   
Cells   
My Mother’s Microscope   
Sucking a Pencil   
Pens Unpurchased   
Make Over   
Picture It as if from a Cave   
Like CERN   
CERN: Frontiers, Grave-Diggers   
Reformation   
A Shared Vision   
Magnetic Resonance Imaging   
Cast Adrift   
Altamira   
Time Travel   
Sound Waves   
Carbon Holdings   

Burnishing


Digitised Returns   
Burnishing   
The Census Form Poem   
Furnace Fires   
Glimpse in the Furnace Shed   
Skin Filed for the Job   
1946 for Safe Keeping In   

Postscript: Seeing As