The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995

The Lion Bridge was a revelation to American readers, offering them for the first time a view of the momentous trajectory of Michael Palmer's poetry.

For British readers this is a first opportunity to encounter 'one of the most influential writers in recent years, perhaps because he faces contemporary concerns about syntax and meaning production with some very ancient poetic pleasures' (The Village Voice).

Michael Palmer chooses the 118 poems in this book from a vast, scattered body of work, rescuing much that had gone out of print. Now densely-worked and haunting, now analytic and lyrical, classical and profoundly innovative, these poems are marked by a singular beauty. Robert Creeley remarked, 'The confident brilliance of this writing makes possible a place where words initially engage their meaning - as if the edge of all creation, of all worlds' This is not 'Wittgenstein in verse', despite the intensity of thinking in the poems. While they are novel in mimetic form and in feeling, they are never merely experimental. Like other L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, he stands at an odd angle to all the traditions, but at that angle he extends rather than breaks with what comes before.