Description
Poetry. "The pastoral has always been a civic genre: shepherds' songs written by city workers dreaming of release, of timely coincidence between feeling and nature. In WOOD CIRCLE, one of Wilkinson's most powerful poetic books, the green thought in a green shade perishes—wildfire destroys the canopy, the Calais jungle is cleared by immigration police. The pathetic fallacy is now literal, dawn chorus imitating car alarms. And yet, each line of this astonishing collection offers a new analysis of the earth's fever dreams. If 'None had loved enough what / they must find by losing,' in this book's moratorium we can find time to remember what we never loved enough. These poems sing for mortal creatures, some human, and collect their leavings: skin, bees, infants, fruits, tires. Seared by the world and everything in it, Wilkinson's poems are radiant, damaging, a consuming memorial fire."—Andrea Brady
“Wilkinson’s … distortions of syntax and vocabulary continue to jolt readers into an awareness of how slick and commodified the language of most self-expression has become in what Adorno called an ‘administered world’. … WOOD CIRCLE balances a delicate lyrical sensibility with an acute awareness of the responsibilities that the poet, as denizen of late capitalism, cannot escape through a vacation in the woods.” —Hyperallergic
Author Bio
John Wilkinson is a British poet who has had two distinct careers, in mental health services in the UK as a nurse, social worker, and policymaker, and subsequently as a university teacher in the US where is he now a Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. In historical, critical and reference works, John Wilkinson's writing has come to be treated as a major force in recent British poetry. He is the author of WOOD CIRCLE (The Last Books, 2021) and THE FOLLOWING (The Last Books, 2020).
Author City: USA