Swimming with Horses

Swimming with Horses by Nicholas Hogg gathers poems of travel, witness, and working-class memory across a wide geographical and historical reach, moving from a Pembroke College room once occupied by Ted Hughes to the radioactive deep-time of a nuclear waste repository. Hogg's poetry is preoccupied with reading and writing as acts of preservation against war, extinction, and erasure, returning often to its literary inheritances in Burnside, Drake, Orton, Dickens, and de Beauvoir. Swimming with Horses is reportorial and cinematic, cool and unshowy, attentive to detail and to the texture of voice.