Published 2020. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617162 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Will Stone’s fourth collection represents both a reiteration and amplification as well as a judicious maturation of the material found in its forebears. Appearing at what feels to many like a decisive moment in history, these powerful new poems are perfectly poised to existentially engage with an ever more fatally entrapped society, intoxicated with technological instruction and unable to free its wheel from the tramline of a delusional reliance on fast petrifying methodologies, in short to abort before extinction. In The Slowing Ride Stone reclaims his role of cerebral journeyman, an inveterate trawler of history, both recent and far distant, moving back and forth between epochs and events, between personalities, cultures and landscapes, leaving behind delicate silken threads of suggestion, salvaging what remains of the humanistic in delineating the replicating tragedies and punishments endured by the fallen and the uncomprehending, those who unknowingly share a non-linear time. Like its predecessors The Slowing Ride reintroduces that rare species, an English-born European poet ‘conjuring extraordinary visions of beauty and despair, joy and horror, revelation and nostalgia’.

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

Comments on previous collections:

“Stone’s landscapes hum with mesmerising, motionless interiority, his lang-uage hints at the consolation of pattern and though the mood of these poems is dark there are, as in that fir forest, shafts of light.” —Kate Bingham, Poetry Review

“It is in his images that Stone shows his greatest poetic skill; he moves masterfully between the pastoral and the urban, the ancient and the modern, the religious and the profane. The effectiveness of the images remains constant throughout, and it is this effortless versatility that prevents the grim reality of the poetry’s subject matter from desensitizing the reader to its darkness over the course of the collection… While Will Stone cannot deny ‘The certainty of another century of darkness’, the century that he yearns for is a brighter one altogether, and this tension makes The Sleepwalkers a compelling collection.” —Ludo Cinelli, The London Magazine

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