Objects and How to Survive Them: Several Views of John Wilkinson's 'Saccades'

This article concentrates on one of Wilkinson?s longer projects from the 1990s, ?Saccades?, which is also one of his most complex structural arrangements of material. His writing has often been described in terms of its fleeting and kinetic qualities. This article tests the longer work to see what possibilities of formal development, argument or ideology emerge within it. In particular it investigates references to the psychoanalytic theory of object relations in Wilkinson?s work, including Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott and Christopher Bollas. Whatlight do such theorists shed on Wilkinson?s explorations of psychosomatic processes in the poetry? What is the view of subjective life which the poetry develops at the interface between psychology, ethics and aesthetics?