Review of Matthew Welton’s ‘The Number Poems’ on poetryschool.com

“like an artist’s sketch book, a poet showing his workings, with the process of arriving at each line every bit as important as the result.”

All poets have obsessions, and Matthew Welton‘s is poems as patterns. Not just in a metre/rhythm/rhyme/ sonnet sort of way. But at the level of each letter, word, line, stanza, poem, sequence, book. He’s fascinated by arranging and rearranging language in rigorous investigations of how we think, articulate ourselves, come across to others, and engage with the world.

Matthew Welton, ‘The Number Poems’ (Carcanet, 2016)