This book examines the lyric poetry of the late modernist W. S. Graham. By listening closely to his body of work, it exposes the capacity of a poem to describe itself being made in the mind of a reader. The study locates an idea of lyric self-consciousness not only at the level of ego, but as a process of form. Archival material – including worksheets, manuscripts and notebooks – is used to examine Graham's spatial conception of verse in the context of his industrial background and his dialogue with artists. The book offers close readings of the adjacent poetics of William Empson and Veronica Forrest-Thomson, and concludes with a sustained analysis of Denise Riley's long-term engagement with Graham’s poetry, which suggests how Graham’s lyric experiments can be politicised.

Sam Buchan-Watts is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Fine Art at Newcastle University, UK. He is the author of the poetry collection Path Through Wood (Prototype, 2021) and co-editor of Try To Be Better (Prototype, 2019), a creative-critical engagement with W. S. Graham.