Publisher's Synopsis
The poems and translations collected in this volume were written over a period of more than twenty years and are set in a variety of landscapes, including the poet's native Yorkshire and locations across Europe.
Many of the characters in Watkins's work are trapped by their obsessions, condemned to blind iteration. Such are the elderly couple in "Mr and Mrs Fell Tackle the Late Summer Grasses", who are bound together physically and by mutual rancour in the labour of mowing, and the lovers in "Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen", whose narrative circles endlessly back on itself, a figure for the hell in which they are caught.
Other poems in this book address the power of language and art to fashion a fragile order in an absurd world, though art is also seen as a snare, rendering infinitely repeatable the experience it organizes.
Jigsaw also includes several more personal poems - poems celebrating the values of love and friendship in the face of inevitable loss.
This is Clive Watkins's first book
