Windmills in Flames

Tom Raworth's Collected Poems (2003) was acclaimed by the Times Literary Supplement as a milestone: thirty years' work by a major poet of English modernism gathered for the first time. Raworth moves on, radical, inventive and politically engaged. Windmills in Flames takes a vertiginous ride through the language landscape we inhabit. Poems fragment and distort,veer in unexpected directions, reconfigure. Playful, often funny, Windmills in Flames is fuelled by anger at the use of language as an instrument of political deceit and military aggression.


Raworth often writes - and at public readings always performs - in lower case. The delivery is so swift you don't notice the tremble in the air until later, the grenade goes off. Statements coming at you, one after another,without qualification or hierarchy... No flim-flam... He's all detail, all darting quickness.

Iain Sinclair, London Review of Books


Tom Raworth: 'The poems have no purpose, though their author is happy should others find them interesting to read. This book collects some early works missing from the Collected Poems (2003). The rest were written since then. They will help the reader lose weight, have an attractive smile, be at ease with members of the opposite (or their own) sex, have relief from constipation, speak in tongues, fillet herrings and ultimately boost the Nation's economy.'