Otherworld: Cadences

These are the last poems Frank Stuart Flint would ever write, and you can feel the weight of that in every precise, shimmering line. Written in the heady days when Imagism was remaking English poetry, Flint distills emotion into its purest form: a handful of concrete images that somehow hold entire lifetimes of longing. The influence of French symbolism and his friendship with Ezra Pound is unmistakable, yet Flint's voice remains entirely his own. These cadences move between the sensory and the transcendent, between the physical world and something just beyond reach. It is poetry written by a man who would abandon the form forever at 35, after his wife's death, leaving this collection as his final dispatch from the country of song. To read it now is to hold a small, perfect artifact from a moment when a handful of poets believed the right words, in the right order, could stop time.