The unreturning

Malone, Martin2019

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Summary

Iconoclastic, playful and inventive, Malone’s third collection is an audacious attempt to rejuvenate the vernacular of Great War poetry. Ghosts of the Vortex begins a remarkable Great War diptych in which the later dissenting voices of The Unreturning parley with its more traditional elegiac forms. Picking up the neo-modernist mantle of Geoffrey Hill’s early work, the prose poems of The Unreturning represent a breath-taking sequence of merciless hymns to our cultural obsession with the First World War. In it, the self-revelatory instincts of the Great War trench lyric become enmeshed in dialogue with present day contexts in an effort to create meaningful acts of witness for ‘a nation /with so many memorials but no memory’. The result is a collection of great ambition and originality, representing a serious achievement in an area already overwritten by generations of poets during the past century.