Lucius Falkland’s poems chart an affair between two traditionalists who deeply cherish their dying England. Adrift in a sea of conformity, each find their ontological double; their very selves embodied in another. Devoted and plagued with guilt, this volume of poetry follows their life-changing relationship, exploring adultery, heresy, depression, mid-life crisis and the power of shared delusion when the world tells two people that they are “different.”
Falkland’s poems reveal a couple torn between their sacred commitments and their overwhelming feelings for each other, caught between the banal, materialistic realities of life in modernity, and their fantasy of being eternally together in an unchanging, rural England.
“Falkland’s The Evening The Times Newspaper Turned into Jane Eyre (2024), . . . , at least for me, is the best English poetry collection we have had in the last decade . . . Reading Falkland as a 25-year-old Englishman is, without exaggeration, like discovering a fellow sufferer who knows all of the words that you have recited to yourself in the aftermath of a particularly Generation Z breakup, and featuring those old twins, nostalgia and mental illness. Yet Falkland polishes these sentiments to the extent that the suffering seems as if it might have been worthwhile, if only to produce such sentiments so that they might be relayed back in verse. His work is not merely the making of a collage out of the past. It is realising that our canon is our own, that it does not belong to other people, and consequently that it is something we can uniquely wear as armour against the current state of affairs. It is just this form of resistance that is the highest goal of Reactionary Realism.”
—Edward McLaren, DPhil Student, Oxford University, in The European Conservative.
—Edward McLaren, DPhil Student, Oxford University, in The European Conservative.
