Everything is relational. Proximity affects not only how we feel but what we see, the relationships we believe to be important. So does distance. Our measurements don’t work the same way everywhere we look. There are many distortions we are so accustomed to we find them hard to recognise they are even there, twisting, between us and the world, shifting as we move. Parallax is ‘the effect by which the position of an object seems to change when it is looked at from different positions’.
It is one phenomenon that pulls the rug out from under our conviction that our version of the truth is the only one and not one of many. Where we are standing has everything to do with what we believe. Parallax confirms that all we have is perspective. Perspective, that is, to the limits of our senses. (Or perhaps, even, the limits of our language). Our eyes are only instruments, doing their best to perceive the depth. We only have to close one eye to have reason to doubt ourselves. The foreground – what seems within grasp, what is so immediate, and so quickly lost – keeps us occupied. What is near us may appear to move quickly. What is far away may appear not to move at all. The furthest hills are the palest, the slowest, the least imaginable. So much so we might equate them with the sky, take their far-far-away-ness, their stability, similarly for granted. We allow ourselves to believe that the background doesn’t change. Were we to approach it, it would fall apart around us, swallow us into its parts, dissolving our distinction.
Perception is a thread, taught between one point and another, like the line of a tin-can telephone. There is a discrepancy between the viewfinder and the lens. For an accurate reading we can only try to keep our eye level. We might try and fail to direct the eyeline of the person beside us with a pointed finger. They might never see what we are trying to show them. The contemporary world is rife with parallax. Advantage means, at root, a position from which to view things. Advances in technology have increasingly disrupted the arrangement of what is far away and what is nearby. Our proximities and distances are amplified. Our backgrounds Everything we know we know from a point of view. So where does that leave our truth? Can we call nostalgia parallaxical? Can we call bias? Can we call love?
Abridged is looking for poetry exploring how we look at things, how the truth bends in the light (and darkness), the lies we tell each other and the lies we tell ourselves. You can send up to three poems to abridged@ymail.com in Word (or similar), or if unusually formatted, in PDF format. Please also send a short bio. Don’t send anything via Google Drive. Put your name etc on the email otherwise it may end up in the Spam folder and we might not see it. Deadline for submissions is 31st May 2026.
This issue is funded by The Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Abridged is funded by The Arts Council of Northern Ireland and The Arts Council of Ireland.
