No more / burial remedies

Abstract

William Rowe’s poetry emerges from two principal strands. Best known as a translator and scholar of major South American poets such as César Vallejo and Raúl Zurita, Rowe’s own work shares their concern with political violence, atrocity, and the space of freedom that might emerge in spite of death’s seemingly absolute encroachment on life. During the past decade or more, Rowe’s work has taken on new force (and expanded considerably in output) in a mutually productive encounter with a younger generation of poets based largely in Britain. This essay examines Rowe’s poems written in the years since the Conservative Party came to power in 2010, initially as part of a coalition government, which represent a furious, diagnostic response to the suffering wrought by the social cleansing attendant on the 2012 Olympics, the clampdown on “benefits” and associated programmes of “workfare,” the ruthless exploitation of unpaid labour, the deployment of anti-immigrant rhetoric, and policies of foreign intervention (what Rowe calls both “low intensity” and “high intensity” terror). Via Engels’ concept of “social murder” and Mbembe’s “necropolitics,” it focuses on the figure of death in Rowe’s poetry, including the deaths of politicians and the desaparecidos of South American dictatorships, ending on his writing of London’s geographies of power, and the possibility of revolutionary change.