This is Clive Wilmer’s first book since his Selected Poems (1995). None of the poems have appeared together before and they amount to a remarkable grouping of elegies, homages, ‘devotions’ and epiphanies that, as ever in his work, ponder the inter-animations of body and spirit, man and nature, permanence and flow. The keynote is awe, a sense of wonder at the mystery of things, a sense of duty to natural and artistic truths and forms or, as it goes in the title poem, the ‘order in which things fall, / or what intelligence will make of them.’
“Clive Wilmer’s poetry has always meant a lot to me – for its unfaltering clarity, for its delicacy of execution and weightiness of statement and for its faithfulness to its subject matter, without attitudinising or lies.”
Thom Gunn
“boldly lyrical, broad in reference, felicitous in the craft of verse.”
Elizabeth Jennings
“a poet with a distinctly religious consciousness… the poems are chiselled with unusual skill.”
Vernon Scannell