Body Language

Body language and the body of language—from the first words in the first garden to the last words of last night’s lovers—are the entwined themes of Jon Stallworthy’s new collection of poems, his first since The Guest from the Future (1995), described by Poetry Review as ‘snatches of radio traffic from this century’s storms, true stories... and some of the storytelling inspired’.

The centrepiece of the book is ‘Skyhorse’, an ambitious poem for voices that finds in the White Horse on the Berkshire Downs an enduring presence through the turbulence of three millennia of English history. Generations of devotees and riders of this English Pegasus speak of bodies changed by love and war, leading to the book’s second part, a candid, passionate sequence of elegies and love poems.