“Milbank is an important theologian and a dazzling public thinker, and in this book he emerges as a poet of real consequence too. His poetry has the intellectual ardour and the visionary reach that we might have expected, but it is also passionately musical, and deeply intimate.” —Patrick Mackie

“In his third collection of poems, John Milbank continues his ‘diagonalizing’ negotiations with horizontal/vertical, finite/infinite patterns and abutments, while sieving through dense local correlations of the ‘matter of Britain’. These poems take us, via ‘lands of indecision’ through ‘strange oases’ to ‘unexpected heights’, retracing the gesta of Pembrokeshire, Kent, East Anglia, Yorkshire and Northumberland, or those of West Saxons, Jutes, Mercians, Picts and Gaels. Such poetry finds a ‘sufficient remnant’ that can be brought to predict a healed modernity ‘amid right conjunctions’ even though ‘decisive history remains obscure, except through haunts of poetic darkness’. Just as Milbank as theologian insists there is no theology not still speculatively philosophical, here he shows us a visionary theology simultaneously making poetic inroads by which ‘yearnings outlast all understandings’.” —Peter Larkin