Böcker av Alan Wall

From Roman tyrants to the persecuted Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, this sequence explores the dark side of our history, and the glories such darkness continues to provoke in art and literature. Between a dusty cellar in Patmos in the 1st century, and the streets of New York on 9/11, the distance can be measured in seconds rather than millennia.

Doctor Placebo finds himself at the end of the western intellectual tradition, and on certain mornings feels almost as old. He broods about his patients; he broods about his poems. Sometimes the two intermingle and he can't remember whether he is a doctor moonlighting as a poet, or a poet moonlighting as a doctor.

Accompanying "Gilgamesh", this is a collection of shorter poems and sequence. The centrepiece is the section in which the author inhabits the clothes of a number of word-masters who lived in London or nearby: Alexander Pope, Thomas More, Johnson, Coleridge, Keats, Burton, Rosenberg, Pound and others.

Features two long pieces: the title work - a translation and partial transposition of the Gilgamesh epic - and the mixed work in verse and prose, Jacob, originally published in the 1990s.