'This issue of the Axon journal investigates ways in which contemporary poetry speculates about the world, modes of being, reality, creativity, writing itself and ways of understanding the quotidian.

'The period in which these various articles and poems were written (or at least submitted) was one in which the quotidian itself had been anything but predictable. Things that we had long assumed to be part of everyday life were out of reach, new and strange familiarities taking their place. Perhaps, in this respect, our general experience of the world could be said to have verged, through this phase, towards the unusual perspectives that poetry has given us so compellingly through the ages. Many more of us, I suspect, have been pushed towards greater introspection — and reflection. It is fascinating how those two things go together, as Paul Venzo articulates so well here, firstly in relation to sonnets by Petrarch and Shakespeare, but by extension to many contemporary sonnets, which ‘continue to encourage us to speculate on our position in the world: not just our relationship to others, but also to ourselves’.' (Introduction)