First published by John Riley and Tim Longville at the Grosseteste Press, Michael Grant has for too long been the absent voice of his generation. Emerging from a silence of thirty years, The First Dream affirms that literature is not a matter only for the living but, as Riley put it, "the first dream after death". Drawing on the modernist poetics of Blanchot, Grant perches language at its brink, carrying over into English the great twentieth-century French tradition of philosophical verse, forging possibilities for our poetry as harrowing as they are unprecedented.
V
Do you consent to love the iron of grey water
Only as the angel of your night shuts down the harbour
And in the water of that very harbour
Ruins the last radiance caught on his dead wing?
Summon up the fire which has no time or place—
Wind searching for the fire, the tops of dried out trees,
Horizon of a voice where stars have fallen,
And the moon confounded by the chaos of the dead.