This new poetry is saturated in folklore and myth. The glass paintings are a distribution of cultured art motifs to rural households, patterns copied onto glass with feathers or brushes made of marten-hair. They are an expression of humility towards the illiterate. The idea of cultural difference being the effect of distribution technology was illustrated by the pedlars who carried the glass panes around the villages of central Europe. The interest in shopping follows a previous and prolonged interest in manufacturing and production, completing the sequence. Reminiscences of childhood and the wreck of the great High Street department stores around 2020 combine in a personal mythology of grand motifs and elaborate ruins.This volume is a new start after a long period of silence and begins with an inventory of concrete facts around the poet, in his home in Nottingham, close to where he grew up. One theme is defeaturing, the recreation of court and metropolitan art forms in a simpler manner. Radiant messages broken up by distance.Comments on 'On the Margins of Great Empires' (2018):"For the last 30 years, Andrew Duncan has patiently traced alternative wavelengths, to and from the unevocable, irreconcilable and the impossible." (Kevin Nolan)"Andrew Duncan [is] a writer whose poetry, criticism and magazine editing must make him one of the most vital and questing of today's authors." (David Hackbridge Johnson, The High Window)"Andrew Duncan's selected poems from 1978 to 2003 [is] an excited, hugely wide-ranging poetry soaring from the star and jewel riches of the Asian margins down to the brick offices in which are fates are problematized. Quite cryptic but never shirking the open and articulate cry." (Peter Riley, Fortnightly Review)
