'Will Stone is the sharp-eyed beachcomber on the shores of our self-destruction, read him before the tide comes in...' wrote the poet Hugo Williams of Glaciation, which won the international Glen Dimplex Award for a first collection, in 2008. Seventeen years later and four collections on, the tide has certainly come in and, as we note from our precarious vantage point in Western Europe, is rising month on month. Immortal Wreckage is Will Stone's fifth collection and the poems collected here were nourished by the profoundly unsettling years of the Covid pandemic, and the ongoing societal implosion in its wake. The poems of Immortal Wreckage attempt to gain purchase on this dystopian landscape, the poet's raptor like eye passing like a lighthouse beam in the darkness with regular insistence, illuminating the vainglorious landscape of new ruins we have built, overseen by political coteries of charlatans and charismatic psychopaths - this immortal wreckage we bequeath to our descendants.
Praise for previous collections from Will Stone...
"Stefan Zweig's translator into English, Will Stone, is another vestigial poet of pan-Europeanism in a time of fracture. Habitually crossing from his Suffolk home on Europe's edge deep into its cultural heartlands, he has translated into English a growing number of the continent's literary nobility, while writing his own ferocious, densely packed, metaphor rich verse... his oeuvre is less melancholic than simmering with anger as the skies close in." -Rob Selby, Agenda
"Like Baudelaire Stone finds beauty in decay. His landscapes hum with mesmerizing, motionless interiority, his language hints at the consolation of pattern and though the mood of these poems is dark there are, as in that fir forest, shafts of light." -Kate Bingham, Poetry Review
"It is in his images that Stone shows his greatest poetic skill; he moves masterfully between the pastoral and the urban, the ancient and the modern, the religious and the profane. The effectiveness of the images remains constant throughout." -Ludo Cinelli, The London Magazine
"Stone's outlook is unapologetically European, a literary flaneur and translator at home equally in Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and France... Stone as such has a profound awareness of the history of Europe, of otherwise civilized nations launching themselves into a maelstrom of murderous political violence and the ogrish spectre of Nazism and the Holocaust is never far away in these poems." -Richie McCaffery, The Friday Poem