Reckitt's Blue

An iconic work of Western art, Fragonard's "L'escarpolette", or "The Swing", is often reproduced, and its famous foreground image of a young woman losing her slipper midswing is widely familiar. In "Reckitt's Blue", John Wilkinson explores that well-known scene in a long poem that engages with the image of the flying slipper, and he also presents two other sequences of poems based on paintings. Though born out of visual encounters with art, these poems also examine weaponry and domestic and ritual objects - artifacts that evoke a violent encounter. Here, Wilkinson's concentrated lines evidence what the critic Simon Jarvis has called his "unfree verse," that reaches into new and unexpected territory in both style and theme. This combination of sensual beauty, intellectual ambition, and political acuity is like nothing else in contemporary English-language poetry.