Seeing Sights

Between 1968 and 1978 Paul Rossiter lived in London, Tokyo, Scotland, and the English Lake District. Apart from three poems from 1969 set in Japan and collected in From the Japanese (Isobar, 2013), Seeing Sights gathers all of his poems up to 1978. After opening with a version of the Old English 'Seafarer' and a poem each from Cambodia and India, the ambience becomes distinctly northern, with the mountains of the Lake District being an abiding presence. The writing is imagistic, but as the book progresses it takes a more extended, improvisatory form as the poems respond to landscapes, art installations, authors (Du Fu, Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder), work, people met while hitch-hiking, a First World War battlefield, or the hallucinatory storm of a painting by Bosch.