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Polder

The poems in this volume were written during the period 2004-7. Nineteen of the 73 poems were previously published in ‘PNReview’, ‘Staple’, ‘Critical Quarterly’, or ‘Poetry Wales’. The book is in four sections and includes a long prose-poem, ‘Dust’; a series of poems which explore Dutch land- and culture-scapes; a sequence of ekphrastic poems; and a final sequence of poems Horatian in tone and style. These Horatian poems were written at the same time as the Old English translations. Despite the obvious differences in rhythm, tone, diction and metre, the Horatian poems often made use of closed rhythmical structures whose closures mimicked those found in Latin quantitative verse. Quantitative verse on the Latin model is probably impossible in English (something the author previously discussed in a paper for the Philological Society, published in their ‘Transactions’), but given syntactic equivalence between lines, tonal appropriacy and strict metrical closures, one can mimic – that is, give something of the effect of – the Horatian originals. So these poems contribute to ongoing research into the complex questions regarding poetic metre in different languages.