Published 2024. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848619425 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
‘Will Stone is the sharp-eyed beachcomber on the shores of our self-destruction, read him before the tide comes in…’ wrote the poet Hugo Williams after reading his debut collection Glaciation in 2007, which went on to win the international Glen Dimplex Award for a first collection of poetry in 2008. Now some seventeen years later and four collections on, the tide has certainly come in and we note from our precarious vantage point in Western Europe, is rising month on month. Immortal Wreckage is Will Stone’s fifth collection and the poems collected here were nourished from the profoundly unsettling years that began with the Covid pandemic, and those in its wake which have sired a global societal disequilibrium which shows no sign of constriction. The poems of Immortal Wreckage attempt to gain purchase at least inwardly on this unprecedented dystopian extravaganza, the poet’s raptor like eye passing like a lighthouse beam in the darkness with regular insistence, illuminating if only briefly the vainglorious landscape of new ruins we have built, overseen by political coteries of rapscallions and charismatic psychopaths masquerading as honest brokers of progress or reform, this immortal wreckage which we have bequeathed to the children, our descendants.
Praise for previous collections from Will Stone:
"Stefan Zweig’s translator into English, Will Stone, is another vestigial poet of pan-Europeanism in a time of fracture. Habitually crossing from his Suffolk home on Europe’s edge deep into its cultural heartlands, he has translated into English a growing number of the continent’s literary nobility, while writing his own ferocious, densely packed, metaphor rich verse… his oeuvre is less melancholic than simmering with anger as the skies close in." —Robert Selby, Agenda
"Like Baudelaire Stone finds beauty in decay. His landscapes hum with mesmerizing, motionless interiority, his language hints at the consolation of pattern and though the mood of these poems is dark there are, as in that fir forest, shafts of light." —Kate Bingham, Poetry Review
"It is in his images that Stone shows his greatest poetic skill; he moves masterfully between the pastoral and the urban, the ancient and the modern, the religious and the profane. The effectiveness of the images remains constant throughout." —Ludo Cinelli, The London Magazine
"Stone’s outlook is unapologetically European, a literary flaneur and translator at home equally in Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and France… Stone as such has a profound awareness of the history of Europe, of otherwise civilized nations launching themselves into a maelstrom of murderous political violence and the ogrish spectre of Nazism and the Holocaust is never far away in these poems." —Richie McCaffery, The Friday Poem
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