Men, Women and Ghosts

The collection assembles narrative and quasi-narrative poems that deliberately exclude purely lyrical pieces, experimenting with vers libre and a polyphonic-prose layout to achieve musical movement and theatrical vividness. Several poems transcribe instrumental motion into poetic rhythm, most notably passages modeling violin and string-quartet textures. Other sequences present pictorial studies of places and hours, emphasizing colour, light, and unrelated visual patterns. A recurring undercurrent of wartime observation appears obliquely in a group of tablet-like pieces. The work moves among scene-based tales, garden and city portraits, and formal experiments aimed at widening the expressive possibilities of modern English versification.