John Wilkinson

With this new book of sedimented lyric, John Wilkinson’s poetry enters a terrain of creatures flattened in shale, in flat screen and in digital code. If Silicon Valley would repopulate Jurassic Park and defeat death, Wilkinson’s poetry would make actual what slides past in the disregarded day, whether the flattening of a city or the return of seasonal blossom. This poetry swells dry roots; it breaches the total coverage that flatlines the heart’s response, through its urgent and generous rhythms.

Designed and typeset by Phil Baber.

The Following selects from John Wilkinson’s essays of the last three decades, with a preference for what has come to be known as creative criticism, and adds a new essay on reflected boughs in poems by Shelley and a photograph by Sally Mann, and a poem in homage to Sean Bonney. The book’s title is a broken reflection of the essay title “Following the Poem.”

“Through following a poem (not just any poem), a reader can become involved in the evocation and enactment of a radical hybridity, pulling together ways of thinking about the world modernity has categorically but falsely separated; but such reading takes place in time, so continuously a reader unpicks and reintegrates elements of the poem in a felt motion which can restore a healed and full being in the world, involving in its fullness and as a condition of it, the detours, the lapses, and the breaks in his or her journey.”