The Revenant

Concerned with transformations and dislocations - both physical and emotional - the poems in James Lasdun’s second collection speak exquisitely of desire and loss; ‘the spellbound mirrors slumber/ dreaming of sand… a rain of birdsong gibbering like a language you no longer speak or understand. ’ Jetlagged, hungover, out of synch or out of kilter, the figures in these poems just miss each other, just fail to connect. And under their feet - whether it’s a Roman pavement, a hill-path in Mexico, a Surrey lawn or a New York street - there is always something primitive, atavistic, about to burst through. Intellectually rigorous, musical and deftly formal these apparently classical peoms hold in check a dark and acrid animus, erotic and Jacobean.