Words from the Wall
Adam Thorpe · 2019
Where to buy
Amazon’s price changes daily, so the most accurate place to see it is there, at the moment you buy.
View on AmazonThis is an affiliate link: if you buy through it, the site earns a small commission at no extra cost to you, which helps us bring quality content and maintain the site. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
About the book
These remarkable poems are despatches from the edges of experience: from the remote coast of northern Iceland where tree-trunks and dead whales lie beached, to the furthest outposts of the Roman empire in the title poem - 'From the very limit of the world,/Flavius sends you greetings, my lord.' The collection is concerned with borders and brinks - the liminal spaces where distinctions blur between outer and inner, known and unknown, between what is familiar and what is other. This is the terrain of the displaced and deracinated but also the shimmering space where all is volatile, mutable, in flux - and it is also, of course, the thin, transparent veil between waking and sleep, between life and death.0Shadowed by mortality, lit by lyrical grace, Words from the Wall includes poems about the killing fields of Agincourt, Flanders, Vietnam and a memorial poem to the victims of the 2015 Bataclan attack where the dead are 'stations of flame', and it begins and ends at the boundaries of the Roman territory, at the edge of life: 'The girls I laughed with once/in the baths' atrium/are withered and wattle-necked./I love them still...'
Book details
- Year
- 2019
- Language
- English
- Publisher
- Penguin Random House
- Editions
- 2
- Pages
- 80
- ISBN
- 9781787330993
Data source: Wikidata
More by Adam Thorpe
