On Magnetism by Steven Matthews

On Magnetism contains poems about loss and remembrance, about the relation of the Renaissance and the Classical worlds to our own, about locales within lives. They are about sounding the world, and about measuring our responses to it through its various musics.

The poems in the book resonate out from the title sonnet sequence, a capricious tribute to Elizabethan ‘magnetism man’, William Gilbert. Their themes and language echo compellingly back and forth across its different occasions and inspirations.