Jerusalem Deleted

This is the second poem to appear from among a small set entitled The Calendar. Each book relates to the others as the points, not in a line, but of a star: none need be considered as first or last. In Jerusalem Deleted, the speaker treks across a postapocalyptic Britain, searching for life among the remains; a city, once thought broken, is to be expunged. It has become the solemn duty or keenest wish of each and all to capture and suffocate, to cremate and to inter, its “floating middle.”

Simon Jarvis is the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Cambridge University. He is the author of the poetry collections The Unconditional, Dionysus Crucified, and Night Office, and has published seminal studies of Wordsworth, Adorno, and Shakespearean criticism.