Glaciation

Will Stone was named a ''European-leaning maverick'' by Hugo Williams in the TLS which may explain why his remarkable voice was unjustly neglected until this volume first appeared. Stone''s poems have a visionary edge to them replete as they are with a powerful imagery both sublime and unsettling. Suffused with melancholy and a sometimes apocalyptic morbidity his poetry is also lyrically tender and elegiac focusing on both the trauma of mankind pinioned by an ever increasing existential insecurity in a debased natural world and the consolation of revealing a poetic ''spiritual'' essence still active in certain landscapes.