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‘A fine poet … and a richly musical one’. Declan Ryan,Poetry (Chicago)‘There is a great deal to admire in Wootten’s first collection. Hecan do lyric, narrative, darkness, joy, tradition and innovation. Mostimportantly, it is greatly heartening to see a new writer emergingwith such commitment to the traditions of form and the musicalpossibilities of language.’ Jonathan Edwards, Poetry School‘Thomas Hardy would have appreciated these poems.’John Greening, Times Literary Supplement‘Wootten has made an art of the refrain, that time stopping devicewhich can sometimes be heart-stopping, playing variations on therepetition, nudging it into a semblance of narrative developmentwithout erasing the pattern. Poetry almost becomes memory atsuch points.’ Carol Rumens, Poetry Review‘‘This collection takes familiar poetic forms and reworks them for this century’s readers’. D.A. Prince London Grip

William Wootten is the author of the poetry collection You Have a Visitor (Worple 2016) and the critical study The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter (Liverpool University Press, 2015), and is editor of Reading Walter de la Mare (Faber 2022). His poems have appeared in publications including Poetry London, Poetry Review, PN Review, the Spectator, Stand and the Times Literary Supplement as well as the pamphlet Looking at the Horsemen (New Walk 2022). He works at the University of Bristol and lives in London.