Concerned with transformations & dislocations
- both physical & emotional
- the poems in James Lasdun's second collection speak exquisitely of desire & loss; 'the spellbound mirrors slumber/ dreaming of s&... a rain of birdsong gibbering like a language you no longer speak or underst&. ' Jetlagged, hungover, out of synch or out of kilter, the figures in these poems just miss each other, just fail to connect. & 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 & deftly formal these apparently classical peoms hold in check a dark & acrid animus, erotic & Jacobean.