Bathed in green light and packing a punch as a time-served copper, Paul Hartnett steps into the poetry arena with CCTV EYES. Dressed to almost fetishistic detail as a police officer, Hartnett scrapes his hands back and forth over two sheets of sandpaper that are neatly masking-taped to a table at which he is seated. SANDPAPER, the second of ten short pieces within CCTV EYES, is a monologue on the theme of sexual fixation, and serves as a bizarre, enhanced disclosure.

What is unique about Hartnett is that he is prepared to represent damaged sexual proclivities from within a first personal fictional narrative. He steps over from objective observation into literary complicity, entering the perpetrator's secret, self-justifying world.

The origins of the desires Hartnett writes upon are from the darkest recesses of the imagination, but are they his desires, is the work from his imagination? Is the ‘disclosure’ from Hartnett's heart or is he disclosing from the mind of an imagined character or characters, a CCTV footage of the brain written in a time of the surveillance society that has been forced on us by a government that keeps so much information and misinformation about individuals?

What is an established fact with Hartnett’s four published novels and short stories published in a wide range of anthologies is that he researches deeply, often taking words put together by society's outsiders and reworking them into a contemporary character. His work is all about loneliness, isolation, the extremes of fantasy, the extremes of fact: from news reports of teens with guns to the big disease with the little name that killed his Dutch partner in the early 90s.

"So much of what I do is a cut 'n' paste, with me coming in at the end with just a sprinkling of autobiographical detail and, for spice, some swerving imagination that comes from hours of being home alone with a tape-recorder.”