Central to the title poem of Voting for Spring is the long human struggle for survival against ice and cold. The poem makes contact with our present climate crisis, as well as suggesting a dimension which is more personal.

The keynote of Paul Mills’s new book is affirmation, but also uncertainty – a day and night experience for the speaker of ‘Women in a Munitions Factory’, from a group of poems based on archive film. His reaction to his daughter’s psychiatric illness and her recovery is the subject of the powerful poem sequence, ‘21/2001’.

Together these poems reflect his ability to move between the remote and everyday, to combine intense vividness with philosophical insight.

"Paul Mills’ poems are confident, perceptive, entertaining and assured."
Ian Parks, PQR

"Mature, philosophical and adventurous work… Paul Mills strikes me as one of the few poets writing today who is fully prepared not to play safe."
Paul Munden, PN Review

Paul Mills was born in 1948 in Cheshire. He was Gregory Fellow in Poetry at Leeds University, and until recently taught literature and creative writing at York St John University. He is the author of the Routledge Creative Writing Coursebook, and two of his plays have been performed, at the Royal National Theatre and the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Paul's last book of poems, Dinosaur Point, was the overall winner of the Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 1999.