Published 2022. Paperback, 118pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617957 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

A Country Without Names offers a conspectus of human activity from its earliest imagined days and the formation of agrarian state sedentism to our own day. Its tesserae, gathered from beyond the boundaries of a single country or culture, constitute a mosaic in which might be gleaned all the fury and fatuity of the pursuit of that gilded phantasmagoria of a just and beneficent state.

Whilst a certain sombreness – from Flowering Midnight ’s dark elegy for the English pastoral lyric, to the fate of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in the contemporary, and near contemporary, political parallels animating Under Jui-yi Shan – imbues the collection it should be seen, however, as no more than the corollary of an unsentimental probing of experience, in a collection which is both paean for the natural world and indictment of those human qualities and structures which threaten it.

Ian Seed, reviewing Ice Stylus , the final volume, after Interlocutors of Paradise and Obsequy for Lost Things , in Anderson’s Unsubdued Singing trilogy, noted “its highly charged lyricism … the language … sparse, staccato, pared down to a minimum.” He pointed to “its timeless, archetypal quality”, to “the sense of an epic journey into the darkness of the western psyche … One is reminded above all, in the tension between the aesthetic qualities of the writing and its political, historical and philosophical subject matter, of the work of Ezra Pound … In the current political climate this is a book which may also be read as … a plea to begin anew with a narrative that acknowledges the humility of our place within the universe and our responsibility to it.”

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