John Wilkinson: Wood Circle

“The pastoral has always been a civic genre: shepherds’ songs written by city workers dreaming of release, of timely coincidence between feeling and nature. In Wood Circle, one of Wilkinson’s most powerful poetic books, the green thought in a green shade perishes – wildfire destroys the canopy, the Calais jungle is cleared by immigration police. The pathetic fallacy is now literal, dawn chorus imitating car alarms. And yet, each line of this astonishing collection offers a new analysis of the earth’s fever dreams. If ‘None had loved enough what / they must find by losing’, in this book’s moratorium we can find time to remember what we never loved enough. These poems sing for mortal creatures, some human, and collect their leavings: skin, bees, infants, fruits, tires. Seared by the world and everything in it, Wilkinson’s poems are radiant, damaging, a consuming memorial fire.” —Andrea Brady