Reckitt's Blue

Though born out of visual encounters with art, the title poem of this book also examines artifacts that evoke a violent encounter, weaponry and domestic and ritual objects from the Jolika collection of Papua New Guinean materials in San Francisco's de Young Museum. It is here that Wilkinson’s concentrated lines evidence what the critic Simon Jarvis has called Wilkinson’s “unfree verse,” that reaches into new and unexpected territory in both style and theme. This combination of sensual beauty, intellectual ambition, and political acuity is like nothing else in contemporary English-language poetry. The ‘Tornada’ that separates and stitches together these sequences meditates on fire, clay and glaze, on violence and reflective stillness.

 

“John Wilkinson's taut, precise poems, in which lyric grace and ethical urgency move together but never comfortably mix, amount to one of the most significant bodies of work in contemporary poetry.”—Patrick McGuinness

 

John Wilkinson is an English poet living in Chicago, where he has been professor of practice in the arts at the University of Chicago. He has published ten major collections of poetry, including Down to Earth, and a volume of criticism entitled The Lyric Touch.