The Gingko Tree and Other Poems

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Michael Baron's poems come from a lifetime's engagement with language, with the challenge of choosing and arranging words to form the best showcase for ideas. The influence of other poets is detectable - Wordsworth, Larkin, Norman Nicholson? - but Baron avoids pastiche or slavish imitation. His language is a fertile mix of the literary and the demotic. His scale of reference stretches from Virgil to Kilburn High Road. There's a strong historical sense at work, too. The Kindertransport, National Service, radical politics in the Cold War period, political prisoners ... the big subjects are interwoven with quotidian detail to bring them within the reader's range, to make us understand that history is made up of a myriad of actions and interactions. Baron often uses characters to encapsulate a historical moment - his Jewish migrant mother, a jailed Turkish poet, a cleaning lady, a refugee. Whether he sets his poem in London, Cumbria, Lithuania or Oregon, Baron shows us real human beings in real historical time, influenced by and having influence on their geographical and cultural surroundings.