Legwork by Michael Vince

In these poems, movement is a mode of discovery, but in a complex variety of themes. Some involve walking through urban or rural landscapes, where the preparation for the journey helps to determine the destination. The Legwork of the title is both planning and walking itself. Ideas of movement broaden into the displacement of people, or the ironies of colonial voyages, or dislocations in time. As in the poem Fish, ideas might rise from the depths and sink back, or be part of pleasurable repetition and play. Poems in different sections explore such themes from different perspectives, so that interpretations are always in motion, without conclusion, circling back and forth, and poems vary between those with a narrative anecdotal experiences, and others with a tightly driven, anxious syntax. They range across real places – Britain, Greece – and imaginary ones – the building of the Tower of Babel, or the invention of the Promenade.