In Darkest Capital

Overview

In Darkest Capital is a collection of work spanning three decades, charting Drew Milne's growth into one of the most distinctive radical poets of the middle generation. A fellow of Corpus Cristi College, Cambridge, Milne is a poet of politics and nature with a fascination for lichen, a composite organism whose diversity and survival are emblematic of a satisfactory and sustaining order. This Collected Poems engages modern politics, challenges language's tyranny and reshapes modern poetry, reaffirming the place of poetry as witness, critique and prophecy.

Reviews

"Drew Milne is a formalist par excellence. He is a syllable counter, a shape shifter, and above all he is a sonic machine. His native inclination as a formalist is at once modernist and Marxist. But one could also say, simply, that Milne is a late Romantic lyric-poet with a political imagination. His latest turn to lichen introduces a sense of scale to the vulnerable and tenuous relationship we have to the natural world and gives a plaintive urgency to his song." —Peter Gizzi

"Beckoning disjunctions and witty deformations shine their torch on tawdry contemporary realia, but lyrical moments and Scottish echoes fill the interstices with pleasing difference." —Edwin Morgan on Sheet Mettle

"Lyrical social critique becomes a plausible art . . . Milne's rhetoric displays a subtle, internalized argument that draws one to its cause." —Marjorie Welish on Go Figure

Author Biography

Drew Milne is a poet and critic concerned with ecology and politics. He is a fellow of Corpus Cristi College Cambridge and his work has previously been published in PN Review.