'the most accomplished poet of his generation' - Andrew McNeillie; 'Paul Batchelor's big takes on history, power, landscape, language and labor keep skewing intimate; he ever inflects his observations of things, and of the local, with fascinating perspective, with memory both individual and collective. The Acts of Oblivion is wonderfully difficult to boil down to easy summary of methods and ... Read moresubjects, for Batchelor's formal range is enormous, his imagination and his tones flexible and intricate. But he comes back and back to what we keep and what we destroy, maybe especially to what we say and what we can't or won't let ourselves say — what we prevent ourselves or are prevented from saying — and how language lives in us and in our acts. How our acts might be, themselves, a kind of language. Does this make him sound esoteric? He's the opposite. "O halver — ," he writes in an ode to a brick, "...when words fail may you always be at hand." Yes please!' - Daisy Fried; 'The irony of Acts of Oblivion is that it is entirely composed of acts of excavation. Personal and historical memory are intertwined, as with a sequence of poems about growing up in a mining village (memories and ancestry are like coal — dangerous extractions: live or cold). Another sequence takes on yet another paradox, "the marble veil," which delves into questions of what is revealed and concealed in art and its history. These aren't academic concerns in Batchelor's hands; the poems are dramatic monologues inflected with big emotions: exhilaration, terror, wonder. They are parables for our time. They wear their accent proudly, and make the English language proud, in a double sense: projecting, splendid. It is a collection that rewards deep reading, engagement, and rendering aloud. It rings out. It's brilliant.' - Ange Mlinko Show Less