Contubernales

Henry Gould’s remarkable Green Radius is not quite like anything else. This huge, slowly-rolling poem of the Mississippi draws us in the course of its 132 individual pieces (plus coda and preface) from January to December 2023. Broadly modernist in its blend of myth, history, scripture, quotation and personal material, its sinuous length is made beguilingly readable by the recurring form of its wave-like stanzas. This story of the river - of the trees that become vessels upon the river, of the men and women on those vessels - is also a story of the river of time and of song, looking back to poetry as ancient as Homer, Pindar, Virgil and Catullus 64, but also across time and languages to more recent predecessors, such as Villon, Baudelaire, Coleridge, Celan, Yeats, Crane and Walcott.

-Victoria Moul
Professor of Early Modern Latin & English
University College London