Material Witness

A striking, meticulously crafted poetry collection that interrogates history, nature, and memory.

Material Witness, Edward Ragg's sixth collection, bears witness to all manner of materials: from botany, bower birds, diving bell spiders, rock formations and coral reefs to a Nazi-stamped photo of the poet’s mother as well as Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Las Meninas paintings of Velázquez and Picasso. In three sections — ‘Scenes’, ‘Acts’, ‘Aftermaths’ — Material Witness reveals an interlinking architecture, constructing a poetry profoundly wedded to the physical universe and variously concerned with love, family history, the natural world, even the simple act of stirring a cup of tea. This is a poetry that conjures in all senses ‘the strange companionship of materials’.