Clive Watkins's powerful second collection is by turns sensuous, sombre, lyrical and discursive. Already the Flames explores the position of those complicit in suffering or compelled to observe it in a world that appears ruled by malice or chance. The early sections are shadowed by the figure of Apollyon, the demon who attacks Bunyan's pilgrim. Hauntings, entrapment and escape are themes that weave in and out. The book moves towards an ambiguous release in the realm of the personal. The collection is remarkable for its formal range: poems, and sequences of poems, in free verse, in prose and in rhymed and unrhymed metres of various kinds. There are also several idiosyncratic and fluent translations. In Already the Flames Clive Watkins fulfils the expectations created by his first Waywiser book, Jigsaw, of 2003.
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