Will Stone - Drawing in Ash

Published 2015. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, ISBN 9781848614598. 2nd Edition. [Download a PDF sample from this book here.]

‘Will Stone is the lycanthrope of contemporary poetry, a haunter of the haunted, at loose in the European necropolis. He is drawn to the darker edge of genius, attuned to the shades of Kleist and Trakl, of Rodenbach and Verhaeren, and to the landscapes they have evolved in their image. Transfixed by moments of physical and mental dissolution, he is their elegist, and a true initiate in the noble science of melancholy.’ —Stephen Romer

‘Drawing in Ash is a striking and poignant piece of work, which strikes at the heart at the problems of modernity. Through telling the deaths of famous individuals like Benjamin, Himmler, Chopin or Nietzsche, Stone raises disturbing questions about civilization and brutality. Bleak and beautiful, the poems elegize and bear witness, lamenting the emptiness at the heart of Western society.’ —Zoe Brigley, Agenda

‘With one foot firmly in a European tradition, especially that of the turn of the twentieth century, this astonishingly well-informed second collection establishes its mood less through fricative stylistic variation than through concentration and intensity of lyric expression and image. Many of Stone’s images have a visionary quality…’ —Tiffany Atkinson, The Warwick Review

‘“In one dive billions of krill find God. / Ghostly like a low gas flame / they go on a while unseen, they exist / to explain the blue whale’s darkness.”

This is a wonderfully eerie image of the world’s ocean. It juxtaposes our inevitable end with an image to suggest how we remain at the point of extinction still mesmerized, mystified and moved by the world’s mysteries. We need poetry that does not sanitize or airbrush what we must accept as awful and true about human behaviour. And that is the valuable job Stone’s poetry is doing. Those who find this hard to handle should look away now…’ —Belinda Cooke, The London Magazine

‘Stone’s work is undeniably the real thing…’ —Grevel Lindop, The Warwick Review

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