Books by Mr John Wilkinson

Down to Earth is at once a road poem of the American mid-West, an epic of migration and ubiquitous borders, and a meteorological model of energy transfer. This book knows no limit to poetry's ambition, dodging every border post, down every highway, like the ocelot running through its narrative.

The Lyric Touch brings together essays by John Wilkinson on twentieth century British and American poetry, several now recognised as classic but hitherto hard to obtain. Throughout this book, writing previously seen as startlingly modern is reconnected with the English Romantic tradition. Formidable poetry is made to become irresistible.

Wilkinson's classic, Proud Flesh, is a journal of love's intensities and convulsions. Panning across its characters like a camera, this is lyric poetry as film noire, filled with jealousy, violence and sexual obsession. Incandescent images play across the bodies of the lovers, each caught, frame by frame, in an intense act of surveillance.