Michael Vince’s generous, intelligently reflective Legwork impressed me deeply. It’s a book that repays careful reading and rereading. I’ll try to say why by looking at some poems in the opening section, ‘Around Greece’.

Poems in it recall short expeditions within Greece, exploring by bus or on foot. They present small incidents with a fullness of life that makes reading them an immersive delight. They make encounters and events we might normally think of as trivial shine with a kind of archetypal, even numinous light while remaining thoroughly grounded in the day to day realities of rural and insular Greek life. … Continue Reading

Michael Vince, Back to Life. Mica Press. £10

You can link to my review by of this book on the London Grip by clicking here.

Michael Vince’s Long Distance is haunted by a sense of how old things live on in the present and the traces of dead things linger. This is particularly true in the first and third sections, set in England. Perhaps surprisingly, the second section, set in Greece, focuses mainly on what seems to be a single personal relationship in the present of the poems, and the fourth on glimpses of contemporary life, sometimes in England, sometimes in Greece.

‘What seems to be a single personal relationship.’ Vince appears committed to the idea that poetry should present itself objectively, however personal and subjective … Continue Reading