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Description
W.N. Herbert’s new pamphlet illustrates his ongoing fascination with language, register, image, and the power of belief systems to engage the reader in some serious philosophical questions – not necessarily in a serious fashion. It also continues the poet’s method of starting with a structure, then disrupting or disturbing it. In Greek Orthodoxy, the iconostasis is a screen of icons which separates the nave from the holy of holies. Instead of icons, the poet has developed a series of surreal collages sparked in part by his encounters with rustic and ruined chapels on the island of Crete. The accompanying poems discuss existential questions with a host of saints, sinners, and the Holy Trinity, sometimes using the poet’s native Dundonian dialect to keep us all grounded. Image and text complement each other to produce a powerful, pleasing and inventive encounter with the sublime from a multi-talented poet and artist.
W.N. Herbert was born in Dundee and usually lives in North Shields, from where he pines for Emprosneros, a small village in Crete. He has published nine volumes of poetry, most often with Bloodaxe, and five pamphlets, including Murder Bear (Donut Press, 2013), which won a Saboteur Award. His work has been shortlisted for the Eliot, the Saltire, and the Forward, and has gained four PBS Recommendations and three Scottish Arts Council Awards, plus a Cholmondeley Prize. He was first Wordsworth Fellow at Grasmere and first Dundee Makar, (city laureate). He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His Unselected Poems appeared from Smokestack Books in 2024.
