Lens in the Palm

Grovier Kelly

"A Lens in the Palm" speaks from a world of fragmented philosophies and troubled meditations. Haunted by the ghosts of Keats and Spinoza, of Rodin and Turner, the voices that echo through these poems lead us into a place that is at once familiar and dazzlingly strange. Poems materialise from a palimpsest of twenty-first-century cities "Paris and New Orleans, Oxford, Milan" where declarations of faith and disbelief clash and blur. Here, the stars "think themselves into existence", the bones of Giotto jangle, and the "hairs on a dandelion fizz".

About the Author

Kelly Grovier was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and educated at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his doctorate from Oxford University in 2005 after being awarded a British Marshall Scholarship. Co-founder of the scholarly journal "European Romantic Review", he is a regular contributor to the "Times Literary Supplement" and the "Observer". He has written widely on the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Keats, and his biography of London's notorious Newgate prison will be published by John Murray (Hodder) in 2008. In 2004 he was appointed Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. His first Carcanet / OxfordPoets collection "A Lens in the Palm" was published in 2008.

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