In Darkest Capital

A poet of politics and nature, fascinated by lichen whose diversity and survival are emblematic of a satisfactory and sustaining order. This Collected Poems spans the three decades of Milne’s growth into one of the most distinctive radical poets of his generation. His poetry relates thematically and this Collected adds up to a major demonstration of the place of poetry as witness, critique and prophesy. Poet is a fellow of Corpus Cristi College, Cambridge.

Milne's formally inventive work engages modern politics, challenges language's tyranny and reshapes modern poetry.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.