Strike up music! Scope tomorrow’s printless straits!
I slice the tomatoes, saving their skins – their seeds
                    freckle the countertop. No ideas but in
No ideas but in things – tell me
                    about it...

The poems in Near-Life Experience are curious about the present moment, its weather and animals, its objects and things. They want to make it real in language, catching it before it vanishes. Documenting landscapes, paintings, insects and trees, Near-Life Experience offers a world where understanding is subverted by the day’s distractions and the unexpected shapes of the imagination.

How do I relate to this? What does it mean? What’s happening, exactly? Does experience experience me? With descriptive precision and inventiveness, the poet finds humour and panic at the edges of the actual. The poems measure expanding and contracting times, birthdays, seasons, climate breakdown, witnessing the moment and its ‘sheer / ongoing changes’.

Rowland Bagnalls poetry first appeared in New Poetries VII (2018). A Few Interiors, his first collection, was published by Carcanet in 2019. His poetry, reviews and essays have appeared in Poetry London, PN Review, The Art Newspaper and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives and works in Oxford.

• Bagnall’s second collection showcases the poet’s unique and recognisable meditations into language, landscape, art and popular culture • Reflections on painting, photography, literature, landscape, film, and natural history • Features a wide cast of walk-on characters – from Breughel’s hunters in the snow and the American painter Richard Diebenkorn to nineteenth-century geologist James Hutton • Explores ideas of time and poetry’s relationship to the present moment, the “now” of experience • Touches on birthdays, seasons, and the mounting slips of climate breakdown, bearing witness to the moment and its ‘sheer / ongoing changes’

The poems in Near-Life Experience are so fully and intensely realised that to enter the collection feels like entering a living landscape. With great receptiveness and skill, they track the movements of a mind in an era of climate breakdown. This is poetry of friendship, art and solidarity, subtly emphatic in its knowledge that the "rain outnumbers us."
Caleb Klaces
Rowland Bagnalls poems gravitate towards a place at the limits of expression, but then the sheer lightness of their movement allows us to think that this place is easier to inhabit than we imagined. Their rangey, conversational elegance enable them to negotiate conceptual difficulty without either obscurity or self-display. There is so much pleasure in this collection, and so little anxiety.
Laura Scott
In Near-Life Experience, ways of looking at everyday matter accumulate into extraordinary poems that spill over with "an excess of sight". Rowland Bagnall shows us that a poet can also be an architect, film director and cubist painter; his poetics shine an astonishing light onto questions concerning time and space.
Isabel Galleymore
Praise for Rowland Bagnall We glide along, drifting from all moorings. And Bagnall is excellent on this feeling, often catching on those exact sensations so difficult to convey because they have no fixed physical or emotional focus
Emily Hasler, Poetry London
Theres a kind of deadpan humour in much of this work, in part achieved by the tension Bagnall creates...Some of the lines are hilarious.
Simon Collings, Stride Magazine
 Bagnalls narrator is ongoing in spite of the weight of cultural references.
Emma Desphande, The London Magazine
 Theres a breathtaking precision with which Bagnall negotiates the inner life and lives of himself, of those around him and of his readers. Images and ideas loop and modulate, the world and its ideas are questioned and interpreted with with wit and deep attention. And if the tone is often melancholy and searching - yearning for some deeper connection and spiralling through art, film, translation and missed connections - I frequently laughed, I re-read poems out loud, I went outside and read them again. And whats going to keep me doing so indefinitely is the poets defiant and hard-won sense of wonder.
Luke Kennard
 A beautiful and eerie book, A Few Interiors tells us what it is like to feel the outlines of personhood becoming vaguer and vaguer. Its no longer the sudden lapse in concentration so much as the sudden lapse into concentration that unnerves, like only realising that someone has left a room when they re-enter it. These poems move from memory to disaster to artwork to movie to prayer in an uncannily frictionless manner, while reminding us of the possibility that none of this has actually happened, or that weve seen it all before, only / in passing or in blinding light. These hallucinatory and funny poems remain stalled, anxiously and hopefully, mid-brushstroke: the moment upon which everything depends, like the moment between knowing you might nearly jump / and actually nearly jumping.
Oli Hazzard, author of Blotter