Tom Raworth, and beyond poetry to the work of composers, of both classical and popular traditions, and of artists and thinkers, from Klee to Wittgenstein. The poetry is also characterised by an unusual openness to both traditional and emergent poetic forms such as visual, sound and performance poetry, and by a politics situated firmly on the Left. It is an œuvre that is vibrant, alive and full of possibility, with its eye set firmly on the future.

One of the early sequences included in this volume, ‘cover versions’, takes William Carlos Williams’s poem ‘This is just to say’ and rings the changes in a set of variations, which render the poem not in, say, German or Italian, but as it might be written in English by a German or an Italian. The Portuguese version, for example, begins:

that I ate the plums who were in icebox

The combined effect of these versions, like a verbal installation, makes the moment of  Williams’s poem ricochet across the Atlantic, from country to country, from fridge to icebox to cooler. This theme of variation and translation – which links back to Bach’s Goldberg Variations and to Raymond Queneau and other Oulipians – is a key modus operandi in Gilonis’s work (it is there also in the north hills corpus and in ‘Three Misreadings of Horatian Odes’, and elsewhere), and it puts Gilonis at the head of a long line of innovative contemporary poets, from Tim Atkins to Peter Hughes and Caroline Bergvall, who have been engaged in renewing poetry with experimental, prismatic, forms of translation.

Other poems here engage with nature and the pastoral tradition. In the second of his ‘ two carnivore sonnets’  Gilonis describes the speed, swoop and blur of the airborne predator, capturing its darting in the movement of the language:

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light on blur of wings only seen after its vanishing