Books by James Sutherland-Smith

Sixty-four improvisations, whose principal motifs are a stretch of a small river in Central Europe and a once feral black cat, navigate the language that we inhabit and that inhabits us. Three philosophers, Boris Karloff, Li Bai and an Indian companion, ghost in and out of the poems.

"This is a masterpiece. The love poetry is especially beautiful. The entire sequence is in a way a love poem [and] is a fine discourse on language, especially poetic language, and on simple speech aspiring to truth while aware that this is an ideal forever double-crossed by the duplicity of words in the human moth. (Irving Weinman)