The Day and Other Poems

This collection of short poems is divided into four sections and includes the poet's experience as an Exmoor forester, a sequence set in the Sabine hills of central Italy, the theme of erotic friendship, and a mixture of anecdote and satirical epigram with compacted memories of travel. The poems portray the opposition between the desire for openness and the desire for isolation while demonstrating the power of language to illuminate reality.

Robert Wells is the author of Selected Poems and The Winter's Task and has published translations of Virgil's Georgics and Theocritus's Idylls. His reviews have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, and his verse translations have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3.