The carnivore in question, Cordulegaster boltonii, the goldenringed dragonfly, could have been the subject of a Ted Hughes poem, but the delicacy and precision of observation here, with its respect for the insect-other, makes Hughes’s work seem almost bombastic in comparison. Another diptych, ‘Two Poems from the English of the Wordsworths’, gives us a different take on nature poetry. These pieces obliquely circle round Wordsworth’s poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, in the first piece by sampling excerpts from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal entry of 15 April 1805 describing the same episode (which Gilonis defamiliarises by removing any reference to ‘daffodils’), in the second by performing erasures on Wordsworth’s poem itself. Gilonis is attracted to the poem because, like the Wordsworths, he takes seriously the idea of writing about flowers, and in other poems, such as ‘walk the line’, his descriptive eye is arresting in its precision:

on a far slower swell; sea -campion’s white globular calices bright nodes shining on a ground of buff It is typical of Gilonis to approach with new eyes a traditional poetic task such as this (he does much the same with the ekphrastic), to both pick up on and renew the tradition with experimental forms. Though the Wordsworths’ work once helped lift the veil on nature, the tradition it established has, through repetition, become part of what, paradoxically, prevents us from seeing. There is nothing more clichéd than a poem about flowers.

Gilonis’s meticulous use of language inspires meticulous reading. Many of his poems take delight in meaningful word-play, reminding us of the different senses hiding behind a single word, of words’ homophones (‘peace’ and ‘piece’), or the different words hiding in a single sequence of letters. In ‘remembering Scott LaFaro’ he writes, in an efflorescence of word-play reminiscent of Raworth:

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