Skywriting

The poems in Skywriting celebrate the colours and textures of places, and the people and histories that create them. We trace a journey through the landscapes of the poet's imagination: Mexico, Italy and Japan feature, but we return time after time to the English Cotswolds, a landscape which has become primary to him. The poems bring alive places and scenes both strange and familiar, each shadowed by our awareness of threat and loss. Several poems are dedicated to friends, including an important elegy for Ted Hughes; others are composed with a sense of the fragility of ancient places threatened by modern wars. At the age of seventy-six, Charles Tomlinson explores new meanings and new forms, on a continuing poetic odyssey.