Jigsaw

The poems and few translations (Hugo, Heine, Rilke) included in this collection were written over a period of more than twenty years, and are set in a variety of landscapes, including the poet's native Yorkshire, and locations across Europe. Many of the characters in Clive Watkins's work are trapped by their obsessions, condemned to blind iteration, as the elderly couple who are bound together physically and by mutual rancor in the labor of mowing, or the lovers whose narrative circles endlessly back on itself, a figure for the hell in which they are caught. Other poems address the power of language and art to fashion a fragile order in an absurd world, though art is also seen as a snare, rendering infinitely repeatable the experience it organizes. This first book demonstrates a rare skill, in both its rhymed and metrical poems and in the smaller number of poems in free verse.