JL Williams: Condition of Fire
Published 15 February 2011
Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611450
"Now I will tell my stories of bodies that change . . ."
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Ovid wrote his famous stories of change just before he was banished from
his beloved Rome and after travelling and observing many diverse and vibrant
landscapes. He may well have visited and was knowledgeable of the Aeolian
Isles where volcanoes cast molten lava into turquoise seas, whipped by the
winds of the god who made his home there.
It was to these rapturous,
Edenic and violently creative islands that JL Williams ventured to write
the poems in this collection; poems inspired both directly by Ovid's tales
and informing the new story that emerges from the old—a post-apocalyptic
vision of the earth where metamorphoses engender rebirth out of the ashen
wasteland that man has made of the world.
Ovid expressed the truth that to change is to survive, and this message erupts out of the poems in Condition of Fire, whose language and images strive to communicate in new ways the essential elements of myth, creation and the burning breath of being.
Download a sample PDF from this volume here.
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