Quest for Ions (Poiesis Publishers, 2021) is the debut collection of artist, film-maker and poet, Browzan. It features poems produced over the last ten years, exploring the nature of the human condition. They are clearly informed by his ability to see the world through a visual artist’s eye.

I think my favourite poem of the whole collection is the stunning Sehnsucht (German for ‘yearning’ or ‘longing’) in which there is an impressive synthesis of form and meaning. Browzan captures the contradictory complexities of Berlin in a breathless list of vivid images: its sordid underbelly of ‘A nibbled nipple/ A smacked arse/ A filthy paradise/ A wounded cat/ Starved of affection’; the drug culture with its ‘chemical tastes’ ; the violence of ‘crisp slurs of hate’ that elicit ‘unhatched panic attacks’; its fractured beauty which he describes as ‘a red ruby,/ Reduced to fragments/ Scattered across a train track’; its sensual…