The Vineyard Above the Sea

The title poem of Charles Tomlinson's new volume describes the vineyards of an area of Italy which has been the subject of many poems since his earliest work. In the Cinque Terre vines are cultivated along the cliffs, within precarious sight of the sea beneath, their wine tasting sharply of its surroundings. In this way they have something in common with poetry itself. These are the poems of a traveller and explore the personal through the sense of place - Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and the West of England. 'I like something lucid,' writes Tomlinson, 'surrounded by somethingmysterious.' The book includes his moving elegy to another traveller, Bruce Chatwin. Tomlinson's geography is as large as Lawrence's, but his passionate restraint reminds us of Edward Thomas. In his translations he responds to those elements which reveal the distinctive, hardly transferable qualities of vision as it takes shape in languages very different from his own - Russian, French, Spanish.