A Grain of Sand in Lambeth: Poems [Paperback]

In A Grain of Sand in Lambeth, poetry becomes a lens through which to explore the complex, visionary world of William Blake. Drawing on Blake’s own rejection of tradition and his relentless quest to challenge the boundaries of art, Geoffrey Babbitt confronts the tensions between genius and convention, life and death, light and dark.

Each poem in this collection inhabits a moment of Blake’s life, offering a vivid glimpse into his unique perspective—a perspective that rejected the normative for the transformative power of imagination. From his visionary watercolors to his provocative views on oil painting, these poems draw readers into Blake’s world, where reality and the unseen converge in prismatic intensity.

A Grain of Sand in Lambeth is an invitation to experience the world through Blake’s eyes—a world where imagination reigns supreme and art is a living force.
 “Transcending both the act of homage and the scope of retrospective, A Grain of Sand in Lambeth forwards the visionary and profoundly humane purposes of William Blake into our present distress. This is a book of passions and of passionate challenges. Babbitt's poems rise to those challenges, moving Blake's purposes into our contemporary idiom and attention, there to affirm the divine spark that must be kindled again and now if justice and environmental sanity are to be realized. That poetry is capable of such an affirmation is in itself a reason to rejoice.”
—Donald Revell, professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, author of The English Boat

“A visionary with visions, Geoffrey Babbitt takes up the task of slowly traipsing through the shadow lives and illuminations and hauntings of William Blake. To read and witness the dazzling arrangement of philosophy and prose and poetry in A Grain of Sand in Lambeth&lƒI