Wild and Wounded

"Wild and Wounded" collects Michael Hamburger's shorter poems since "Intersections" (2000). It is published to mark the 80th birthday of one of Britain's leading poets of the last half-century. The dominant theme in these poems is the passing of time - whether referring to the injured swan in the collection's title poem, a tree 'surreptitiously dying', or the poet himself, comtemplating...difficulties with grammar now, with tense, With mood, with person, case - and, yes, the sense. As illness, frailty, absence and obsolescence become more pressing to the poet, his poems, by contrast, achieve an enthralling robustness and vigour.