Identified Flying Objects

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is a retired mathematician and the current poetry editor of the online magazine London Grip. This is his sixth full collection. Of his previous book Poems in the Case – which combines poetry with a murder mystery – James Roderick Burns wrote “In lesser hands, the book might have ended up as some kind of arch, genre-bending mash-up … but instead is a triumph of inventiveness and wit, memorably sustained over the length of a short novel.” (The High Window, Spring 2019). The narrative poems in Fred & Blossom, a sequence about romance and flying in the 1930s, were described by Afric McGlinchey as “pleasurably rhythmic and rhyming, with witty run-on lines and visually aesthetic forms.” (Sabotage Reviews, April 2015).

This collection looks at life-changing events of a personal nature – broken legs, heart transplants, bereavements – and also considers larger scale upheavals like invasions, liberations or revolutions. Such happenings may be preceded by warnings that go unheeded; and Identified Flying Objects reflects this regrettable human tendency to ignore well-founded predictions by framing the poems as a sequence of contemporary responses to verses from the Biblical prophet Ezekiel.