This collection of poems, The World in My Mouth, celebrates the complexity of the natural world, both in and around us. The author pays homage to the scientific ideas of the renowned physicist Paul Davies and to his notion that science too is a form of poetry: it is the poetry of nature. Josef Tom, who trained as a mechanical engineer in Czechoslovakia, lives and writes in Melbourne, Australia.

Through all the changes in direction of Holan's life and work, the word wall took on an immense breadth of meaning to him. He chose the epigraph "thy walls are always before my eyes" from the prophet Isaiah to refl ect the sensory boundaries of the body and the boundaries of existence. Th is book is an anthology of Holan's poems connected by the central motif of a wall or walls. The walls of creation, the walls of words that open to vision and hearing, are dramatically rendered in small poetic portraits (Keats and Homer) and in certain echoes or responses to the poetry of, for instance,...