This is Clive Wilmer’s first book since his Selected Poems (1995). None of the poems have appeared together before and they amount to a remarkable grouping of elegies, homages, ‘devotions’ and epiphanies that, as ever in his work, ponder the inter-animations of body and spirit, man and nature, permanence and flow. The keynote is awe, a sense of wonder at the mystery of things, a sense of duty to natural and artistic truths and forms or, as it goes in the title poem, the ‘order in which things fall, / or what intelligence will make of them.’
CLIVE WILMER was born in 1945, grew up in London and studied at Cambridge where he still lives and teaches. Four collections of his poetry have been published by Carcanet Press. A freelance writer and lecturer, he has co-translated the Hungarian poets Gyorgy Petri and Miklós Radnóti, edited prose works by Thom Gunn and Donald Davie and anthologised the writings of John Ruskin, William Morris and D.G. Rossetti. His critical writings appear in several periodicals, notably the TLS and PN Review. Other publications include Cambridge Observed: An Anthology and Poets Talking, a collection of BBC interviews with contemporary poets.
Thom Gunn writes: ‘Clive Wilmer’s poetry has always meant a lot to me - for its unfaltering clarity, for its delicacy of execution and weightiness of statement and for its faithfulness to its subject matter, without attitudinising or lies.’
Elizabeth Jennings describes Clive Wilmer’s work as ‘boldly lyrical, broad in reference, felicitous in the craft of verse.’
Vernon Scannell writes: ‘a poet with a distinctly religious consciousness… the poems are chiselled with unusual skill.’
