WORCESTER poet, Anthony Wood has a grasp of imagery that sometimes leaps like the River Severn salmon on the front cover of his new book.

This publication, The Blue Empyrean of the Whither Loade, is a collection of verse and lyrics that repays close inspection.

Not every poem is a winner, and sometimes the rhymes, when Wood use rhymes, are a little too clunky, such as when he says of salmon, “But they’re top of the bills in aerial thrills and spills”.

But Wood is usually much better than that, and his ‘putative dance drama’ reminds me of the great Spanish poet and dramatist Lorca, with its touches of surrealism and near, or actual menace.

After, there are many shadows in the world of the imagination.

Much of Wood’s imagery looks to the river, which in his case is The Severn, and so there is a pleasing local “grounding” for this collection, namely the landscape of Worcestershire.

There is also, and quite often, power in his diction, such as when Wood writes: “When words are refused to offer/the benefit of their means,/ effigies betrayed by instincts/ rise with a power unforeseen...”

I’m not quite certain what that means, but it does grab my attention; and the ending of this particular poem, “The Talking Cure”, is truly tender... “at night, we kiss at night,/ folding hands like leaves.”

Wood moved to this county from Cornwall in 1992, and Cornwall’s loss is Worcestershire’s gain, judging by this slim volume.

The collection is handsomely illustrated with photographs and is well worth a look.

The ISBN - 978-1-5272-2638-8.

Gary Bills-Geddes