Frieze

As much elegy as exploration, this compendium of poetry attends to experiences of childhood and the workings of history, discovering how individuals mark time and are subject to it in their lives. As readers experience poems inhabited by a host of shadows—fallen warriors, a conquistador, a father, a mother, a boxer—they are presented with a revelation of the poem itself, its capacity for expression and the space it provides for reflection and its precision and beauty. With this second collection, John Whale continues to take up the mantle of the 1960s Leeds School of poets, and Jeffrey Wainwright in particular, with whom he shares a philosophical and questioning stance.