Veii and other poems

The title poem of Robert Wells' collection revisits the site of the Etruscan city of Veii, exploring memories and the passage of time. Ancient coins are conjured through vivid descriptions, creating a complex mythology rooted in long traditions. Wells' language is precise, and the poems offer a deeply felt experience.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 96 pages
Publication date: 29 July 2021
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd

The title poem of this collection, Robert Wells's first since the Collected Poems and Translations of 2009, revisits in memory the site of the once great Etruscan city of Veii. There, as a child, the poet discovered an incised potsherd: "Was that the day when antiquity / – The place where all is over and done – / Took ineluctable hold of me?" The poems return to familiar places and themes from a later now, a revised perspective: memories are real, perhaps more vivid than before, but further off, measuring time and age. Ancient coins abound. In The Coin Cabinet, they are conjured in their variety by means of a series of epithetic evocations, so that one does not doubt their reality, or the complex mythology they evoke and the economy rooted in long traditions and rich in known, shared narratives. Robert Wells's language is exact, the experience of the poem is deeply gone through, Thom Gunn wrote, there is a constant desire to adhere to the truth as he apprehended it rather than to glamorize it. The inexpressible becomes expressed.

Weight: 132g
Dimension: 134 x 216 x 10 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781800171244