Veii and other poems by Robert Wells Robert MacFarlane expressing solidarity with a nation’s

expressing solidarity with a nation’s wound

then poetry could be one of the most neglected

From contemporary re-imaginings of the interwar decades in Steven Knight’s TV series Peaky Blinders to Liz Berry’s prize-winning poetry and up and coming new talent

interrogated and attacked with a fierce melancholy

violence and disarray – spheres of dystopia and decimation – to grief

Veii and other poems by Robert Wells Robert MacFarlane expressing solidarity with a nation’sThe 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