Books by Aidan Semmens

Aidan Semmens's new collection moves from the range of the world to the deeply personal, always placing the detail in historical context. Using a variety of poetic techniques, he moves from the moral ambiguities of empire to the run-in to Brexit; from a reworked 40-year-old prize-winning poem to the breakdown of language suffered by his mother.

Aidan Semmens is a poet who has always been fearless in confronting the plight of the world with its disturbed ways. The mordantly titled Life Has Become More Cheerful is a chilling quote by Stalin after the horrors of the Great Purge in 1938 and sets the tone for what is to come.

'A Ritual Landscape' sets out Aidan Semmens' stall from the start of this, his third full-length collection. These are poems that 'have legs'-that continue the journey outward begun in A Stone Dog and The Book of Isaac, and elaborate the argument and project of one of our most ambitious and accomplished poets. What runs through this book, like Brighton rock, is a traditional, yet questioning, and taut lyricism, a poetry of argument in the voice of smouldering outrage. The voice of these poems inhabits the place of post-industrial landscape in a way not as effectively revisited and examined since the poetry of Roy Fisher in, 'a place of gathering /an enclosure of power and spirit, ' in a 'slow recovery of knowledge'

Thirty-some years in journalism have left little obvious trace in Aidan Semmens's poetry- though, like his sports headlines, his verse is grounded in word-play and natural speech rhythms. In his first full-length collection he engages death, complexity, and the Authorised Version, which provides several of his titles.