POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION

This is John Birtwhistle's first collection of poems since `Tidal Models' (1980). Its energy and concentration come out of an interest in a wide variety of formal models - from Chinese lyrics and Imagism to Anglo-Saxon riddles and Surrealism - and an appreciation of certain key twentieth-century radical poets: Breton, Eluard, Ho Chi Minh, Neruda, Ritsos and Fortini. Political disquiet, expressive tenderness, and a care for ordering, edge against each other in the poetry. Dennis O'Driscoll commented in `Hibernia' that "a sweeping imagination ranges over past and future, pastoral and urban themes." Reviewing his last book, John Heath-Stubbs described Birtwhistle as "an ambitious and original poet, not afraid to take chances", singling out a group of poems on Conamara as "altogether admirable for their exact and loving observation."