Playing With Fire

The erotic and the sexual are richly represented in this new collection, whose subjects of celebration range from the lemons in Robert Graves' garden to a blood-drinking Tibetan deity. At its heart are a group of passionate love poems, and a sequence set in an East London strip club, treated with the imaginative insight and verbal skill that led R.V. Bailey, reviewing Lindop's Selected Poems, to write that, 'All the tricks in the poet's bag work for him as a master, so unobtrusively that it is only at the second or third reading that you become aware that the thought and feeling...are supported by an amazingly intricate web of sound.' This new collection will enhance Lindop's reputation for originality as well as for mastery of poetic tradition. As Kathleen Raine wrote, 'Grevel Lindop celebrates a cosmic harmony that upholds the greatest and the least parts of the universe... His perspectives open on the stories within stories, where what is "real" and what is illusory are woven...