Wild and Wounded: Shorter Poems 2000-2003

"Wild and Wounded" collects Michael Hamburger's shorter poems since "Intersections" (2000). It is published to mark the 80th birthday of one of Britain's leading poets of the last half-century. The dominant theme in these poems is the passing of time - whether referring to the injured swan in the collection's title poem, a tree 'surreptitiously dying', or the poet himself, comtemplating...difficulties with grammar now, with tense, With mood, with person, case - and, yes, the sense. As illness, frailty, absence and obsolescence become more pressing to the poet, his poems, by contrast, achieve an enthralling robustness and vigour.