Supplication, lament, invitation, warning; invocation, danger, devotion. You cannot consider these poems anything but true, but to what world do they correspond? With flames and shadows, birds and stars, for days of rage and of wonder, Vaughan Pilikian takes us on a series of risky, exalting journeys to the end of lyric. Read and live them.

Vaughan Pilikian was born in London in 1974 to an American mother and Armenian father. After studies in classical languages, fine art and filmmaking at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard, he has produced work in many different fields as a scholar, poet, filmmaker, painter, sculptor, designer, theatre director, performance artist and screenwriter. His career to date has seen him chasing burning barrels in a village in Devon, filming the lives of shipbreakers in northern India, translating ancient Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata and being
banned from Resonance FM in 2014 for a prescient satire on Donald Trump. In 2012 his play Leper Colony ran for three weeks at the Yard Theatre in London. Since 2015 he has been travelling the borders of Europe making an independent film about the refugee crisis. Most recently, in 2016, he was the first and, it turned out, the last British Council Resident Artist in Transcarpathia, Ukraine.