black herald press

Paolo & Francesca in a Colder Climate

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MARK WILSON

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Poems

Isbn 9782919582389 – May 2025 – 78 pages – 14 € / £13​

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Reading Mark Wilson’s poems amounts in some ways to re-encountering and freshly confronting Ezra Pound’s original disaffiliation with pre-modernist English poetics, that which the American poet saw as being full of “transient, and trivial things”. For Wilson, like Pound in his first long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, writes poems which seem still “out of key with his time”, but which, at the same time, strive always “to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry; to maintain the ‘sublime’”.

In this poetry collection, we find Wilson beguilingly intermingling personal grief, love, and Pre-Raphaelite art, Modernist literature, music, ekphrasis, and Christian spirituality, as if to resuscitate them from his own remembrance of their effect when he experienced them. It is also medieval literature, and especially troubadour poetry, that has impacted his writing, allowing Wilson’s voice, both ancient and modern, to attain an almost celestial pitch, as he asks of the readers only that they wait, patiently, and listen to it, until the poet’s own wounds “scab[s] over” and grief, through language – “an armoured / vehicle, / bringing menace / & wholesale atonement / in all its inky contrail” – is resolved.

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This is the long night.

This is the cold night.

This is the dark night.

 

Night of last hope. Will I turn

from darkness? Will you turn?

A night of wonderment & pain,

& spirits who congregate elsewhere.

 

Leave it in the goblet’s bowl, as I left

the incense-stick: charred, refractory.

 

This is the dark night of the soul.

This is the dark night which agonises.

 

This: the dark night of your ancestral pool.

This: the dark night of your sacred white deer.

Yet will you turn to me now?

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from 'Yuletide'

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