POETRY

Michael Baldwin on Welcombe Overtures:
'This is a fine collection which will consolidate the reputation of an important poet. John Moat's way with verse is all music. Under and beyond his metres the music is always there, sounding out the harmony he so richly experiences in the natural world. Serious, satiric, gnomic and - in the oldest and best sense - witty, his is the verse of a man who knows where the deep things are and can touch on them without heaviness.'

Adam Thorpe, novelist and poet, writes of 100 Poems :
'In all of John Moat's work, there is an extraordinary sense of place which is home. The house and the garden with its babbling stream take on something more than a literary or even mythic status: they envelop us in a reality which is deeply felt, a kind of breathing source from which the poems derive their peculiar strength - wherever they travel to in this much travelled volume. The presiding imagery of the poems - the haunting presence of an Arab girl, the lost child, the sea, the crackle of firewood or the scent of syringa - gives this selection a binding unity as solid as a stone smoothed in the water scales of the stream. It is very English in atmosphere, as (say) Gerald Finzi's music is, and this attracts me, too: yet there are few contemporary poets whose work breathes so broadly and generously.'