Ianthe Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781848614178)

"Haunted by a phrase of Keston Sutherland's, 'The pressure to think and sing', Peter Philpott's lyrics on his granddaughter Ianthe read like the meditations of a slightly deranged but liberated Wordsworth, who has escaped onto the streets of the twenty-first century, not quite sure whether he is the grandfather or the grandchild. Full of grace and wonder, and a grasp of complex forms which have been chewed carefully before being spat out again, this is poetry of the highest order, proving without question that there are no ideas but in sings." -Philip Terry

"The Ianthe poems are a wonderful interweaving of actual and verbal, of babies and metaphor: 'hoods up! connotations tied tight!' In this exclamatory deictic mode everything points, like a child's finger, or a line of verse, to the present imperative. The poems teeter like toddlers on the edge of the non-verbal, or exploit the simplified language of children's primers to great comic effect. Peter Philpott recuperates both our excitement with the world around us and with new poetic form." -Frances Presley