Description
Book SynopsisExploring how humanity is rooted in and linked to everywhere and everything, David Batten brought a fresh voice and precise language to his reflective, but ultimately hopeful debut, Transhumance. In Untergang, he moves from the open, cosmic, affirming tone to a sequence that is internally reflective — darker, almost claustrophobic. Whereas his first collection ended on the plateau, in the light, anticipating summer, Untergang starts indoors in the dark of a power cut in the depth of winter and finishes inside the writer’s ribcage, where it is even darker. This is not a world without hope, but it is one that urgently needs to wake, to face the dark and change it. Increasingly confident, Batten uses his distinctive, lyrical voice as a call to reflect on what might really matter in life.
Trade Review"David Batten achieves with impressive facility what other contemporary poets achieve – he evokes lyrical spaces and landscapes, he is adept at constructing his poems so that they are premised upon vividly present scenes. For him though this facility isn’t an end in itself but the starting-point of an intellectual exploration which is aided by his depth and range of knowledge and articulated also in a discursive mode which is unusual in British poetry and which helps him to take up themes and develop them from one poem to the next." — Ian Gregson
