Purchase Published Books

Collections:

ILLUMINATIONS

(Leaky Boot Press, 2016)

‘Illuminations’ is a visionary poem in a hundred sections which levitates the reader from the blindness of modern avarice to the scintillating light of an imagined paradiso. Taking inspiration and luminous cues from Ezekiel, Dante, Blake, Rimbaud, Pound, Celan and Hill, Mark Wilson creates a disarmingly new liturgy which seethes with humorous paradox, semantic invention and startling curiosity. ‘Illuminations’ is certainly a 21st Century antidote to those destructive twin-forces of global capitalism and religious fundamentalism. It is also a timely canticle for future linguistic contemplation, allowing the mind to envision both the luminosity and well-being of the individual quester hoping to live within a far more light-receptive community. “(Wilson’s) books mark a new kind of redemptive excitation not seen in British poetry for a long time” - Andrew O’Donnell

THE ANGEL OF HISTORY

(Leaky Boot Press, 2013)

After the iconic, apocalyptic meditations of his second collection ‘Passio’, Mark Wilson extends his canvas even further with ‘The Angel of History’. This series of longer sequences positively soars with both a semantic muscularity and a transcendent musicality which is reminiscent of Ezra Pound's ‘Cantos’ and the later work of Geoffrey Hill. Taking inspiration from the compositions of Arvo Pärt and Keith Jarrett, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, as well as the philosophy of Plotinus and Walter Benjamin, ‘The Angel of History’ is an ideogrammic cantata of intricate and strident beauty; a contemplative, but necessary, tesserae for disjointed times.

PASSIO

(Editions du Zaporogue, 2013)

QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME

(Editions du Zaporogue, 2011)

Forthcoming:

FENLIGHT SONATAS

‘Fenlight Sonatas’ is a Late Modernist sequence which, on one level, explores the history, art, mythopoeia, literature, governance and spirituality of a particular region: the Fens of Cambridgeshire and South Lincolnshire. Yet this psycho-geographical mid-length poem, like the horizontal landscape itself, stretches out to become a semantic prism and microcosm of the larger ‘matter of Albion’ over more than two thousand years. Sediments of allusion and intertextuality create a rich, engaging tapestry of sonic and imagistic possibility where the time-spanning agon of light and darkness is re-enacted as in paintings by Turner or Constable. In the living traditions of Anglo-Saxon verse, Arthurian Romances, the Metaphysicals, William Blake & the work of such Twentieth Century masters as David Jones and Geoffrey Hill, this is a poem full of intrinsic value, to be revisited and lived through for many years to come.

CANTATA

In recent years Mark Wilson has made the mid-length sequence his forte, a form which he believes is closely akin to a musical composition, weaving aria & recitative through a number of movements. ‘Cantata’ showcases nine of these works in a stunning performance which runs the gamut from mythopoeia to melopoeia, silent oracle to jazz syncopation, Trojan War to Second World War, blue traynes to red byrds, Glastonbury to the Zone – counterpoints which not only fascinate the poet, but will also enchant readers. To conclude the book, there is a 21st century epic, ‘Helen in High Definition’, where the poet apostrophises the eternal feminine in a semantic tour-de-force rarely seen, or heard, in contemporary poetry.