The poems in this latest collection by Martin Anderson are largely concerned with the nature, from both a perceptual and ontological perspective, of continuing and intrinsic identities. We belong "To nowhere/to no thing/to the shortest abridgement/of air of word/to the cruel insignia/of our acquisitions." At the heart of all that we are, of all that we think, feel, see, touch, taste and smell, are 'shadows/pulled through/a world impatient/to sound'. A world, pregnant with meaning and language, which is, finally, a 'mirror colliding/with its reflection'.

Martin Anderson was born and grew up in England. Shearsman Books first published his work in the 1980s. Anderson has lived a large part of his life as an expatriate and many of his poetry collections have been published abroad. His poetry is, as a result, not well known in the UK. The poems of Snow, written whilst resident for almost three decades in the Far East, look both to that region for their ostensible subject matter and back to the UK. Snow is a collection in its own right, not simply borrowings from Anderson's earlier collections. Its choice and arrangement of poems suggests a...

This compendium edition of all three volumes of Martin Anderson's The Hoplite Journals evokes events and places largely in South East and South Asia as well as the West, exploring allegiances and identities within the troubled context of mostly colonial and ex-colonial possessions.

Obsequy For Lost Things consists of three prose-poetry sequences. The first two share the setting of the Thames estuary. They all share, however, like the author's previous collection of prose-poetry sequences (from Skylight Press) Interlocutors of Paradise, and his The Hoplite Journals, a concern with history and the psychology of colonialism. As such they also confront, in "the defeat of colonialism," what Martin Jacques called "the most important event of the 20thC." An event, involving the attempt to brutally resist it, which coming-of-age British poets in the 1960s didn't confront, and...