From Professor Murasaki's Notebooks on the Effects of Lightning on the Human Body

A John Latham poem is a like a precipitation: images coalesce around a single memory the way ice crystallises around the smallest particle to form a snowflake; the strange logic that constructs them is unique each time. Passionate, satirical, mysterious, the poems in his sixth collection capture the vibrancy of a childhood that still bewitches him half a century later, alongside the cruel betrayals of old age, and the fresh possibilities bound up in each new encounter. Latham’s training as a physicist may bring a cosmic perspective to the landscapes he maps out, but they are also profoundly local. The wonders of the universe are no more mysterious to him than the simple oddity of other humans. And as the title poem demonstrates, every last atom of detail, even the mistakes of a makeshift translation, have the capacity to beguile. The title poem - From Professor Murasaki’s Notebooks on the Effects of Lightning on the Human Body - won second prize (out of 12,000 entries) in the UK’s most prestigious competition, The National Poetry Competition (2006).