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–  wind and light move the leaves  day and night leave no moves Such close attention to language, here and elsewhere, reminds us of the different layers and different senses packed into words. The effect is part of a larger de-sedimentation of the language, an exploding of linguistic hierarchies, through which the reader has a greater awareness of words’ multiple senses, and the words in the poem, even its letters, begin to breathe. There is a linguistic turn here, but it is one that is simultaneously embodied, which is one reason why place plays such an important role in these poems. The suggestion is that attention to the signifier and attention to the world are not mutually exclusive, as some readings of structuralism have suggested, but folded together. The point is made succinctly in ‘The Matter of Britain’, each line literally part of the ‘matter’ of Britain – Natrolite, Opal, etc. – while, as an acrostic, the letters placed along the left-hand margin read: no ideas but in things. What this fails to convey is the sheer variety of poems and approaches here. Many begin with a musical theme, such as ‘pibroch’ (for Sorley Maclean): pibroch, a Scottish mode of piping, is a theme-and-variation form, and here Gilonis extemporises on the theme of Sorley Maclean’s poem ‘A’ Chorra-Ghridheach’ (‘The Heron’) to magnificent effect. But there are also playful sound poems based on birdsong notation – ‘Learning the Warblers’ – experiments in concrete poetry such as ‘an egg for E.’, minimalist nature poems reminiscent of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Thomas A Clark, such as ‘wind keen’, which cry out to be carved in slate or cut into the side of a chalk hill; ghazals, shanties, re-visioning translations and misreadings, collaborations, and 14
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poems based on noun-plus-adjective combinations reminiscent of Queneau’s quennet. And there are powerful performance and political poems, such as ‘foreign policy’, and unHealed, which creatively translates from the Welsh of the Canu Heledd (‘long after the old Welsh’, as Gilonis puts it): watcher wearied in tabu ringed a chant be in retch grown wrong duty wrath gadgetry threw way edgy a wrath eddy a wind ode wage idly war Again working with variation, the poem progressively metamorphoses this ancient lament into a fierce critique of coalition warmongering, here with lines taken verbatim from the ‘corporate ethics’ and other sections of the website of a company that manufactured cruise-missiles used in Iraq: fully field programmable with in-flight re-targeting to cover the whole kill chain with sensor-to-shooter capability for effects-based engagement and an integral good-faith report The volume and variety of poems collected here, combined with their linguistic depth, makes it impossible to discuss very many of them in great detail in an introduction. Yet what becomes increasingly clear as one reads is that this is a body of work of the highest ambition, and highest order. If all of English poetry of the last fifty years was suddenly lost from the archive, in the kind of textual catastrophe envisioned in Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel Verbivore, one could go a long way towards reconstructing much of the best of it, and much of what matters about it in terms of the future of poetry, starting from the poems in this book. Read it. Then read it again. Philip Terry 15

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–  wind and light move the leaves  day and night leave no moves

Such close attention to language, here and elsewhere, reminds us of the different layers and different senses packed into words. The effect is part of a larger de-sedimentation of the language, an exploding of linguistic hierarchies, through which the reader has a greater awareness of words’ multiple senses, and the words in the poem, even its letters, begin to breathe. There is a linguistic turn here, but it is one that is simultaneously embodied, which is one reason why place plays such an important role in these poems. The suggestion is that attention to the signifier and attention to the world are not mutually exclusive, as some readings of structuralism have suggested, but folded together. The point is made succinctly in ‘The Matter of Britain’, each line literally part of the ‘matter’ of Britain – Natrolite, Opal, etc. – while, as an acrostic, the letters placed along the left-hand margin read: no ideas but in things. What this fails to convey is the sheer variety of poems and approaches here. Many begin with a musical theme, such as ‘pibroch’ (for Sorley Maclean): pibroch, a Scottish mode of piping, is a theme-and-variation form, and here Gilonis extemporises on the theme of Sorley Maclean’s poem ‘A’ Chorra-Ghridheach’ (‘The Heron’) to magnificent effect. But there are also playful sound poems based on birdsong notation – ‘Learning the Warblers’ – experiments in concrete poetry such as ‘an egg for E.’, minimalist nature poems reminiscent of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Thomas A Clark, such as ‘wind keen’, which cry out to be carved in slate or cut into the side of a chalk hill; ghazals, shanties, re-visioning translations and misreadings, collaborations, and

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