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This Wilderness & Other Concerns
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 24 2025
Pages: 56
Weight: 0.19
Height: 0.13 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
This Wilderness & Other Concerns
by Martin Kennedy Yates
A searing new collection from poet and mixed-media artist Martin Kennedy Yates, This Wilderness & Other Concerns is both homage and confrontation - a poetic journey through post-pandemic Birmingham, the politics of survival, and the fractured beauty of language itself.
At its heart is This Wilderness, a five-part response to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, shifting the scene from 1920s London to 2020s Birmingham. In these pages, derelict canals, graffiti-tagged arches, and ghostly underpasses stand as monuments to grief, resilience, and the struggle for meaning in a culture hooked on distraction. This is a cityscape where the fakery and sleight of news collides with ancient myth, where rats, prophets, and poets walk the same cracked pavements.
The book then opens into Other Concerns - poems of place and presence, where pylons, sheds, canals, and scraps of graffiti take on liturgical weight. These pieces are as sculptural as they are lyrical, blending page-craft with performance energy.
Finally, in Scousenlish, Yates unleashes a mytho-biographical alter-ego, drawing on the alliterative pulse of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight. Written in a rich, inventive dialect, these poems are meant to be spoken aloud - raw, musical, and haunting.
Praised by poets and critics alike for its fearless voice and inventive form, This Wilderness & Other Concerns is:
Extraordinary poetry. A rich, dark exploration of tribalism and the underbelly of modern Britain. - Emma Purshouse, National Poetry Competition prize-winner
Inventive and searching... weaving time, place and text into its own unsettling tapestry. - Gregory Leadbetter, Professor of Poetry, Birmingham City University
A genuinely thoughtful approach to how the page and white space can release meaning. - Jonathan Davidson, poet and festival founder
For readers of T. S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, and contemporary British poetry that refuses to play safe, this collection is an immersive experience: by turns brutal, tender, and visionary.
This Wilderness & Other Concerns is not just a book of poems - it is a reckoning, a city's ghost-story, and a fierce hymn for survival.
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