Output details

Muscovy

This collection incorporates several research strands: firstly, it continues the adaptation process used in Mandeville, with several poems based on original 17th/18th century texts, transposed in various ways for poetic purposes; secondly, it reflects an increasing interest in early modern history, arising out of the author’s work on a historical novel, The Book of the Needle (not in this REF submission) and informing his essay ‘A Prophet As Unreliable Narrator’; thirdly, investigations into the history and landscape of Wales features prominently, and finally, there are several ekphrastic poems responding to photographs and paintings. While the collection is not unified in the same way as Mandeville, it nevertheless contains several long narrative poems. The lack of unity allows the exploration of a greater variety of themes and techniques than was possible in the earlier collection. Most of the poems are in syllabic form, but there are several technical experiments, including the use of number of words as well as number of syllables per line as a constraint, acrostics, a lipogram, a ‘code’ poem which substitutes typographic symbols for successive letters of the alphabet and another written almost entirely in end-stop lines. As with the use of borrowed source material, these constraints (deriving in part from an interest in the OuLiPo movement) are a method of moving beyond the subjective lyric.