Jonathan Glover

"The teasing title poem of this book is about weather. Rain falls, wind cracks its cheeks as in Lear; the noises are drops like kisses falling, 'fallen into birdsong on Mars'. What would it sound like, be like, to hear it? The poem wants to know what it can't yet know. But as the book proceeds, the poet -- on a human heath, tormented by loss -- hears something like it, unearthly sounds on a planet without atmosphere, sound making quite another kind of sense. Jon Glover wrote most of the poems in this collection before his wife's sudden death from cancer in 2019. He developed the themes and fragmenting style of his previous book, Glass is Elastic (2012), where language was always quizzing itself and how it might relate to the actual and the historical world. Intense, playful, unpredictable, the poems surprised. Here, in the disturbing environments of Upstate New York, Calgary Bay or his Bolton front room the poet confronts illness (his own), hospitals (his visits) and wonderful ambulances (his transports). He resists attempts to see hints or destinies. Then bereavement throws up an actuality of a different order. The collection ends with a mock-sonnet sequence, written during the pandemic, in which the poet tries all the doors and windows to find her, to speak with her -- love poems where love has not changed but its circumstances have. 'Will I want ever to get out of this place -- the past of the poems in this book?' the poet asks. There are no answers, yet."--Provided by publisher.

Complete Poems brings together the published and unpublished work of one of the most significant poets of the late twentieth century, founding editor of Stand and of the Northern House imprint. As well as reprinting all the poems included in Silkin’s books (from The Portrait and Other Poems in 1950 to Making a Republic in 2002), it includes significant poems previously unpublished or published only in a wide variety of journals, and work transcribed from manuscripts. Complete Poems demands a new perception of Silkin’s language and his concerns, the breadth of his passionately humane response to war and the Holocaust, and his scrutiny of humanity alongside nature.

In hospital for a scan, Jon Glover became fascinated by the ways in which Magnetic Resonance Imaging creates pictures of the hidden processes of the nervous system. It could express what is already written within the human body, in all organic life and the earth itself. Whether in the hospital scanner or the vast particle accelerators exploring the fabric of the universe in laboratories deep underground in Geneva, the process of making atoms collide to reveal new meanings tells a story, written in the brain, on the walls of a cave, in a poem. The poems in Magnetic Resonance Imaging grew out of an enforced awareness of the Fragility of the human body; they grow into an understanding of the indestructible force of the imaginative energy that constantly rearranges existing elements into new forms.