Luna Park

Grevel Lindop is a poet who has stood up to walk his poems before sitting down to write them. He knows their landscapes first of all by foot. The poems in Luna Park travel between the Staffordshire locales of Tixall, Shugborough and Cannock Chase, to Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford, venturing as far afield as Mexico and Cuba. Each is shown to be a 'landscape of fantasies', a ledger of upkeep or decline that reflects a people's values. Luna Park, the abandoned funfair of the collection's title, is also the landscape of Lindop's own poetry, a haunted theme-park of talkative ghosts, blurring the line between ritual and amusement. The moon, the collection's totem, peeks repeatedly through the lines, in the silver of two lovers' rings, in the luminous X-ray of a broken arm, in the stones resting in fields or threaded on a necklace. An air of moss, tree bark, the warm dampness of woods infuses Lindop's verse, but so too does the warmth of human intimacy, bonds between lovers and generations. The collection ends in the extended prose piece 'Hurricane Music', Lindop's memoir of a visit to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. // Care for detail, love of nature, clear eye and formal excellence. Every poem shows us more than we have seen with our own eyes.' - Elizabeth Jennings, Independent // 'One of the most complex and sophisticated British poets [...] Classical tradition fused with the edginess of late modernism.' - Kevin McGrath, Harvard Review