The title poem of Charles Tomlinson's new volume describes the vineyards
of an area of Italy which has been the subject of many poems since his
earliest work. In the Cinque Terre vines are cultivated along the
cliffs, within precarious sight of the sea beneath, their wine tasting
sharply of its surroundings. In this way they have something in common
with poetry itself. These are the poems of a traveller and explore the
personal through the sense of place - Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and
the West of England.
'I like something lucid, ' writes Tomlinson, 'surrounded by
somethingmysterious.' The book includes his moving elegy to another
traveller, Bruce Chatwin. Tomlinson's geography is as large as
Lawrence's, but his passionate restraint reminds us of Edward Thomas. In
his translations he responds to those elements which reveal the
distinctive, hardly transferable qualities of vision as it takes shape
in languages very different from his own - Russian, French, Spanish.