Lake Shore Drive

Lake Shore Drive is John Wilkinson’s most public, openly political and expansive book. By contrast with the baroque architectonics of his last Salt book, Contrivances, Lake Shore Drive is wide-ranging and variously vernacular in both scope and form, en route between New York City, Damascus, East London and the Welsh, Cornish and Indiana shorelines. Four poem clusters provide the book’s binding force in asphalt and marram grass, protein receptor sites and the remembrance of corrupt data. Among these are interwoven short poems as compressed as expletives, and technicolor desertscapes, along with a gaggle of geese and dollops of general balm. This book will ensure that John Wilkinson’s poetry becomes the resort of a much extended readership.