The Number Poems

The Number Poems occupies the playful middle ground between tradition and experiment. An innovative and unconventional poet, Welton presents us with poems which fuse techniques like rhyme or iambic metre with a playfully postmodern aesthetic, creating new forms that unfold as sets of variations. Fascinated by poetic form but bored by the idea of writing sonnets or sestinas, Welton peppers his poems with extreme alliteration and crazy mathematical vocabulary to give us a selection box of experiments in working within formal constraints.

Matthew Welton was born in Nottingham in 1969. He received the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for The Book of Matthew (Carcanet, 2003), which was a Guardian Book of the Year. He was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2004.