The Slowing Ride

In The Slowing Ride Stone reclaims his role of cerebral journeyman: an inveterate trawler of history, both recent and far distant, moving back and forth between epochs and events, between personalities, cultures and landscapes, leaving behind delicate silken threads of suggestion, salvaging what remains of the humanistic in delineating the replicating tragedies and punishments endured by the fallen and the uncomprehending, those who unknowingly share a non-linear time. Like its predecessors, The Slowing Ride reintroduces that rare species, an English-born European poet ‘conjuring extraordinary visions of beauty and despair, joy and horror, revelation and nostalgia’. “Stone’s work is undeniably the real thing…” —Grevel Lindop, The Warwick Review Comments on previous collections: “Stone’s landscapes hum with mesmerising, motionless interiority, his lang-uage hints at the consolation of pattern and though the mood of these poems is dark there are, as in that fir forest, shafts of light.” —Kate Bingham, Poetry Review “It is in his images that Stone shows his greatest poetic skill; he moves masterfully between the pastoral and the urban, the ancient and the modern, the religious and the profane. The effectiveness of the images remains constant throughout, and it is this effortless versatility that prevents the grim reality of the poetry’s subject matter from desensitizing the reader to its darkness over the course of the collection… While Will Stone cannot deny ‘The certainty of another century of darkness’, the century that he yearns for is a brighter one altogether, and this tension makes The Sleepwalkers a compelling collection.” —Ludo Cinelli, The London Magazine "This collection is a challenging, but necessary reading experience and showcases a vitally European poet of tremendous intellectual, historical and emotional range. There is little solace to be found here, but an uncompromising vision and striking aesthetic the likes of which I believe are very thin on the ground in poetry, anywhere, today." —Richie McCaffery, Agenda