Pomona's Orchard, Adrian Blamires' third collection, is dedicated to the arts of peace. Its tutelary spirits include Caliban tending to the dying Prospero, a great-aunt rescuing cats and dogs in the Blitz, the enlightened schoolmaster to an orphaned John Keats, and Pomona, Roman goddess of fruitful propagation, as the genius loci of a Herefordshire orchard. Miracles of love and healing are conjured in the face of violence and rapacity. Lament and dissent are sounded, alongside poems of witty, sensual profusion. The collection closes with a Tudor-themed sequence which presents pressing encounters - highly politicized, highly eroticized - between the Virgin Queen and her subjects. Drawing on Elizabethan lyric, symbolism, realia and innuendo, the poet offers a tragicomic vision of queen and country, a resonant blend of history and myth.
