Schedule of Unrest: Selected Poems(Salt Modern Poets)

Schedule of Unrest selects from John Wilkinson’s collections of poetry published from 1974 to 2008. A growing readership is seeking ways into an impassioned and beautiful body of writing. The unfamiliarity of its surfaces and soundscapes have too long delayed its appreciation. This book, selected by a scholar of Wilkinson’s work, will further enlarge his readership, as well as providing a convenient resource for teachers. In one volume, both Wilkinson’s troubled internal lyric and the breadth of his social and political engagements are well represented.

About the Author :
John Wilkinson is an English poet living in Chicago and teaching at the University of Chicago following a career in mental health services in the UK. He has published six collections of poetry with Salt and a collection of critical essays, mainly on recent British poetry. His most recent book of poetry is Reckitt’s Blue from Seagull Books.

Review :
John Wilkinson’s Effigies Against the Light for its sheer verbal inventiveness and unheard-of melodies made much contemporary poetry seem straightforwardly pedestrian. Some of Wilkinson’s poems still seem to me like white noise, like information rapidly and promiscuously flooding my attention; but I do not believe that they will necessarily continue to. Others do offer me precisely that sense of the bearing, the bearable and the beautiful; and although, for good reasons, that state is almost untranscribable, and not automatically reproducible in identical fashion for every reader, it is something one looks for in art, and is privileged to encounter. John Wilkinson's taut, precise poems, in which lyric grace and ethical urgency move together but never comfortably mix, amount to one of the most significant bodies of work in contemporary poetry. Holidays allow both the time and energy necessary for more rewarding reading. I'm looking forward to spending time with John Wilkinson's latest volume of poetry, Lake Shore Drive; his poems are lyrical, sensual, political, challenging, intelligent. Initially alluring and mysterious, they open up gradually in surprising and provocative ways. John Wilkinson is a poet and critic of unfailing verve and accuracy. No voice audible today sounds a more exact imagination. John Wilkinson’s a powerful and intent poet whose language is densely charged with energy-traces: it’s rich with verbs, the sense of happenings, deeds, potentialities, necessities, results.