Griffiths has one of the finest ears – for song, for varieties and cadences of speech – of any poet writing today. His compacted lyrics flash with intelligence and humour. They are shaped by anger, empathy and childish delight. But they are also charged with the excitement of contemporary form: swift, filmic montage and free use of the page space. His poems dig, probe, reveal, expose the language as it is lived, with a range possibly unequalled in any British poet. Their sharp diagnoses of social domination and the ideas that sustain and mask it are a wake-up call. But there is nothing dry about them: they savour language, ask you to dance with it, show you the pain in it, enlarge the world with it. Griffiths was a key member of the British Poetry Revival, both as an activist in the Poetry Society and in the small press scene, and as a writer of inventive, formally innovative poetry. He continues to explore the shapes of contemporary experience, and to denounce agencies of unfreedom. By now he is the author of a large body of work, which this book seeks to make available to ordinary readers. The essays collected here offer guides to reading, commentaries on forms and sources, and a range of insights into how the poems work. There is also a bibliography, an interview, photographs and visuals, all of which help to give a vivid sense of Griffiths’s world.
