Mike Stocks’s sonnets range across the messy landscape of human behaviour, pinpointing the fault lines in a direct and striking language. Whether dealing in sly humour, savage loss, or all the tragi-comic states in-between, he invariably finds a perspective that commands the attention.
The poems in
Folly, with their assured technique and memorable content, demonstrate that the sonnet is a radical and contemporary form, and constitute a debut collection that readers will remember and revisit.
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"A highly distinctive poet. His work as a translator would be
impressive enough, but he is also a poet of power and skill in
his own right, currently concentrating on the sonnet. He is a
writer of the “plain style”, a style arguably more difficult to
employ because it lacks the dazzle of rhetoric which can be
confused for poetry." –
Gerry Cambridge
"It is good to be reminded, by this substantial collection of
sonnets, of the continued pleasure which is still to be obtained
from metre and rhyme. Good observation, spiced with
moments of black humour and social satire, makes this a book
to be relished for its unexpectedness." –
Edwin Morgan
"The sonnet ‘Two Boys’ wields a force available only to a
writer who understands the structural potential of this poetic
form inside out. It made me cry. I regard Dick Davis’s ‘Baucis
and Philemon’ as the great sonnet of my generation, and I
hope that in Stocks we are seeing Davis’s worthy heir in the
making." –
Timothy Murphy
"Mike Stocks’s poems are part of a general humane concern for
the disruptions, pleasures and ironies of ordinary life… He is in
firm command of his various forms, but not in such a tyrannical
way that the poems simply march to order… physically vivid,
inventive, but controlled by manners of line, breath, cadence
and rhyme." –
George Szirtes
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Read an excerpt from
Folly
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