Toby Martinez de las Rivas – författare

Grappling with nature, religion, violence and politics, poems of lucid intensity and astonishing power from three remarkable British poetsGeoffrey Hill (1932-2016) was often considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation.Penguin Modern Poets 7: God Is Distant gathers a selection spanning Hill's full body of poetry, from the astonishing power and compression of the first five decades to the greater experimentalism and fluency of the creative outpouring that began in 1997, and places it alongside work by two younger British poets: Rowan Evans, whose 'tirelessly inventive' and 'vivid lyrical work' (Denise Riley, Eric Gregory Award citation) plays with the legacy of late modernism to create poetry of great beauty, energy and precision; and Toby Martinez de las Rivas, whose first two collections have seen his 'visionary disposition' (Guardian) build to rhetorical heights of Blakean dimensions.Taken together, these are poems of lucid intensity, high seriousness and knowing sidelong glances, as alert to the natural world of the British countryside as they are to the body that suffers and to questions of the soul. They take a long view of humanity's riches and crises, and consider along the way such issues as morality, faith, innocence, redemption, the public spaces of democracy and the acts of violence that rupture them, as well as that patron animal of the Modern Poets series: the urban fox.

In Terror, Toby Martinez de las Rivas leads us on a high-wire act in pursuit of a new kind of communication. By turns political, social, theological, historical and personal, the poems in this debut collection work closely with the reader, asking questions of us and encouraging us never to settle for inadequate answers. Toby Martinez de las Rivas writes with a flare and a rigour associated with some of his guiding lights: Christopher Smart, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Barry MacSweeney, Geoffrey Hill. Seeking a language which might console us, a language with which we might commune in our most intimate and terrifying moments - be these in love, in doubt, in a prayer for an unborn child, or an exploration of the kind of world we might wish to live in - Terror is a thrilling and powerful debut.

Toby Martinez de las Rivas is regarded as one of the most distinctive voices to have emerged in recent times; to some, a modern-day William Blake. The Guardian described Terror, his first book, as 'visionary' and 'exciting', the New Statesman as 'remarkable', and all combined to praise its brave and lucid intensity. Black Sun is a sequel of poise and clarity that is, if anything, more open and accessible than its predecessor. Beginning where Terror left off, it pursues that book's fascination with history and with theology, with the physical body and the body of the State, with preservation and redemption. Black Sun confronts the dark dreams and hidden powers of this world, and, through the poet's attentive watching and wondering, offers its readers a way 'to know - & still to resist a last despair'.'A lucid and spontaneous lyricism . . . how unlike most of his contemporaries Martinez de las Rivas seems to be.' New Statesman

Toby Martinez de las Rivas is regarded as one of the most distinctive voices to have emerged in recent times; to some, a modern day William Blake. The Guardian described Terror, his first book, as 'visionary' and 'exciting', the New Statesman as 'remarkable', and all combined to praise it's brave and lucid intensity. Black Sun is a sequel of poise and clarity that is, if anything, more open and accessible than its predecessor. Beginning where Terror left off, it pursues that book's fascination with history and with theology, with preservation and redemption.

Floodmeadow draws us into a seething pastoral where lightning threatens and thunder gathers, pylons and powerlines hum, and steel-framed gates sing out into the wind. In these incantatory pieces, everything is present at once. The landscape, teetering on apocalypse, is characterised by collision and disintegration. Among fragments of memory and history are meticulously journaled observations of the natural world: the moorhen who 'with exaggerated delicacy steps / free of the reedbeds'; the dragonfly that 'pushes itself through the armour / of its body' to be born. Human relations are fleeting and vulnerable, appearing in the impression of a wedding or the recurring moments captured between a father and son, who make between them delicate balsawood constructions, which - as the poems do themselves - take flight in the turmoil, ecstatic one moment, plunged into darkness the next. This is a visionary collection that invokes other times, dimensions and soundscapes to tell out some word of beauty and abundance in the here and now.