Pomona's Orchard

Pomona's Orchard, Adrian Blamires' third collection, is dedicated to the arts of peace. Its tutelary spirits include Caliban tending to the dying Prospero, a great-aunt rescuing cats and dogs in the Blitz, the enlightened schoolmaster to an orphaned John Keats, and Pomona, Roman goddess of fruitful propagation, as the genius loci of a Herefordshire orchard. Miracles of love and healing are conjured in the face of violence and rapacity. Lament and dissent are sounded, alongside poems of witty, sensual profusion.The collection closes with a Tudor-themed sequence which presents pressing encounters - highly politicized, highly eroticized - between the Virgin Queen and her subjects. Drawing on Elizabethan lyric, symbolism, realia and innuendo, the poet offers a tragicomic vision of queen and country, a resonant blend of history and myth.