Immortal Wreckage

'Will Stone is the sharp-eyed beachcomber on the shores of our self-destruction, read him before the tide comes in...' wrote the poet Hugo Williams of Glaciation, which won the international Glen Dimplex Award for a first collection, in 2008. Seventeen years later and four collections on, the tide has certainly come in and, as we note from our precarious vantage point in Western Europe, is rising month on month. Immortal Wreckage is Will Stone's fifth collection and the poems collected here were nourished by the profoundly unsettling years of the Covid pandemic, and the ongoing societal implosion in its wake. The poems of Immortal Wreckage attempt to gain purchase on this dystopian landscape, the poet's raptor like eye passing like a lighthouse beam in the darkness with regular insistence, illuminating the vainglorious landscape of new ruins we have built, overseen by political coteries of charlatans and charismatic psychopaths - this immortal wreckage we bequeath to our descendants.