6"x9", 212 pages, perfect bound paperback Cover photograph by Louise Mac Mahon ISBN 1903090 45 8  Ordering Information See below for biographical note. This volume collects poetry from ten major works by Geoffrey Squires, from Drowned Stones of 1975 to Untitled III of 2002. As the American critic Robert Archambeau has noted, Geoffrey Squires' poetry has few relations on either side of the Atlantic. While his early writing bears all the hallmarks of modernism, his increasing preoccupation with consciousness and perception has led over time to the lyric abstraction of his later work, in particular the Untitled sequences. Click here for list of contents. Click here for extracts from Drowned Stones and Untitled III. Click here to read Tony Frazer's review in Shearsman 61 Click here to read Robert Archambeau's review of Landscapes and Silences in the Notre Dame Review

Geoffrey Squires was born in 1942 and grew up in Co. Donegal. After reading English at Cambridge he lived and worked in various countries including Iran, France and the United States, and is a translator of French and Persian poetry. He is married with two children and now lives in England.

CONTENTS

from Drowned Stones (1975)
from Figures (1978)
from XXI Poems (1980)
Poem in Three Sections (1983)
from Landscapes and Silences (1996)
from Poem for Two Voices (1998)
Littoral (1999)
Pastoral (1999)
Untitled II (2000)
Untitled III (2002)

from Drowned Stones

(And all the trouble to learn him, the
strangeness of another, his turnings)

it was good, it was as it should be, we lived
two miles from the town, quite isolated, no
car

didn't get the electric till 1953 and only got
it then because my mother had the sense to give
the engineer a cup of tea

well he said we might as well take it up the
hill when we're at it

---

The dry furrow
of the northerner
who doesn't waste
his smiles

a sharp eye for
the useful piece
of wire in a shop
lying around

good husbandmen
the women the same
clean houses, a certain
comeliness

slow to anger
slow to appease
great soldiers
like the Turks

whether they made
the landscape or
the landscape made
them is not clear

a bit on the dull side
spare, but
solid enough
all there

from Untitled III

And in too many places too near or too soon
all around us even behind when we turn

many many small movements
uncertain at first and then

whether it is or has within it
imagine what that would mean

---

To come here is to know it again
as if nothing had changed
and all that had happened in the meantime
was of no consequence had no import
for this place the paths the trees
the light falling through the silence

---

Which is no more than to say

and yet with the capacity to work its way
into spaces we have only just thought of

movement how do we know
one thing following from another

might or might not and anyway if it did