The UWAP Poetry imprint began in late 2016, and there are already fourteen titles available. To judge from the quality of the three reviewed here, UWAP’s energy and ambition is well-placed.

In the first of these books, A Personal History of Vision ($22.99 pb, 100 pp, 9781742589381), Luke Fischer, in his poem ‘Why I Write’, provides a useful starting point. After rejecting a number of familiar reasons for writing poetry – each with a short, ambivalent mea culpa – Fischer eventually offers us the line: ‘I write for the expansion of the present.’

A Personal History of Vision, Fischer’s second collection, goes on to ‘expand the present’ in many different ways, some of them highly poetic and others more philosophical. As many people, including the publishers, have pointed out, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke is a considerable influence on Fischer, especially on the latter’s brand of metaphysics, which is vivid, persuasive, and non-doctrinal. Often these moments or epiphanies are ‘expanded’ from the present – sometimes from landscapes or personal encounters, sometimes ekphrastically from well-known paintings.