Collected Lyrics

Written over the course of five years, the poems in this volume present an intense and cohesive vision of poetry-in-history that insists upon the creative potential of the written word, for good or for ill. Refusing the post-confessional self-obsession which has confined poetry, and lyric poetry in particular, to increasingly narrow limits, these collected lyrics seek to restore something of the power and breadth proper to the most magical and ancient of information-technologies. Writing can operate on a timescale greater than any one lifespan, and literature possesses its own agency, beyond anything that the living or the dead, who call to us through this unreliable medium, might have ever imagined or intended.

This new volume presents readers with a complete collection of the shorter lyrical sequences previously published by Veer: Xaragmata (2013), Orcs!!! (2015) and Sedition Machines (2017), and features an insightful critical-introduction, especially commissioned for this new edition, by Francis Gene-Rowe. The epic poem John Company (2021), a poetic-biography of the British East India Company, is available as a separate volume from Pamenar Press.