In Darkest Capital gathers all of Drew Milne’s poems up to 2017, including two major uncollected sequences, ‘Blueprints & Ziggurats’ and ‘Lichens for Marxists’. A Scottish poet working out of the modernist avant-garde, through pop and art rock, Milne moves between Beckett and Brecht, through punk and beyond. Along the way there are homages to Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Frank O’Hara, Kurt Schwitters, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Cage and Tom Raworth. His poems do not break down into form and content but insist on a continuity between lyrical purpose and critical thinking. An ark of ecological resistances to late capitalism, Milne’s Collected Poems captures the ‘skewed luxuriance’ (Guardian) of his eco-socialist poetics.
