Paolo & Francesca in a Colder Climate

Reading Mark Wilson’s poems amounts in some ways to re-encountering and freshly confronting Ezra Pound’s original disaffiliation with pre-modernist English poetics, that which the American poet saw as being full of “transient, and trivial things”. For Wilson, like Pound in his first long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, writes poems which seem still “out of key with his time”, but which, at the same time, strive always “to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry; to maintain the ‘sublime’”.