You Have A Visitor
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You Have a Visitor is a book of songs and stories. Its 52 poems are arranged to reflect the English seasons. Yet its characters range from American students on a European vacation to a television-watching emperor, and its settings stretch from a space station to Renaissance Wittenberg. Intricately constructed, and employing a range of tight metres, stanza shapes and rhyme schemes, the poems delight in making use of traditional possibilities of English verse, and are, in the case of the lyrics, highly musical. They are also fresh and immediate. The result is a collection that is evocative, thought-provoking and very different from much poetry published in recent years.
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You Have a Visitor is a book of songs and stories. Its 52 poems are arranged to reflect the English seasons. Yet its characters range from American students on a European vacation to a television-watching emperor, and its settings stretch from a space station to Renaissance Wittenberg. Intricately constructed, and employing a range of tight metres, stanza shapes and rhyme schemes, the poems delight in making use of traditional possibilities of English verse, and are, in the case of the lyrics, highly musical. They are also fresh and immediate. The result is a collection that is evocative, thought-provoking and very different from much poetry published in recent years.
Oranges
Such is the subtle rhyming of oranges
The rhyme of the fruit to the full Seville sun
The way that the planet fashions near-images
Such is the subtle rhyming of oranges
Lovers whose lingerings look to their marriages
Lovers too double to ever seem one
Such is the subtle rhyming of oranges
The rhyme of the fruit to the full Seville sun
Published: 01 April 2016
ISBN: 978-1-905208-33-3
Pages: 70
“Some poems are song-like without being songs. Wootten has made an art of the refrain, that time stopping device which can sometimes be heart-stopping, playing variations on the repetition, nudging it into a semblance of narrative development without erasing the pattern. Poetry almost becomes memory at such points.”
Carol Rumens, The Poetry Review (106:2, Summer 2016)
“crisp, well-shaped, inventive”
Anthony Thwaite
“Wootten’s voice is unlike any other on the contemporary scene: light, yet deeply felt and highly romantic, modernist, yet traditional. This intensely lyrical first collection presents an original talent in full flower.”
Hugo Williams
William Wootten grew up in Somerset, lives in London, and teaches at the University of Bristol. He has written widely on modern poetry, his essays and book reviews appearing in publications such as the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books. He is also the author of the critical study, The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter (Liverpool University Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in magazines including PN Review, Poetry Review, the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement.
