Misprint

Dr Johnson said, ‘The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’ Misprint offers the reader countries and languages through the eyes of youth and loss; untimely deaths and memories of distant lands, both dreamed and experienced. In his first book of poems James Womack plays with ideas of tradition, lightly evoking significant themes, and with a bow to pulp culture. We move between real places (Russia, Spain, North Korea) and equally ‘real’ virtual environments (dreams of Russia, ghosts of Spain, the North Korean Press Agency), ending up lost and bewildered but slightly happier about the future. The concluding sequence, ‘Eurydice’, brings together the different strands of the collection in a study of loss and the impossibility of recovering love. In the words of Mr Edwards: ‘I, too, Sir, in my time have tried being a philosopher; but somehow cheerfulness kept creeping in.’