Peter Riley

The Legend of Death

Arts & Literature

“John Milbank's new book of poetry offers us a greatly extended and ambitious structure, concerned with humanity's largest concepts across history and ideology as witnessed at their particular localites, as it were their homes in the landscape. I'm particularly glad that he has in this new venture maintained his sense of poetry as the proper vehicle of such vision, without letting it inflate. The poetry's theses are discovered constantly anew with registers of surprise and wonder which amount to an interlocked modesty. So the discoveries are transmitted to us as an authentically poetical account which never deserts the particular, personal, and questing experience, the eyes on the landscape, the words held in their places by the rhythmic tension of constant realisation and renewal. It is a work of genuine illumination.”