Valley of the Kings – Graeme Ryan (to be published 1st December 2026)
Graeme Ryan’s third collection goes deep into the wounds and crimes of our time, with an imagination wide open to the spirit that could transcend them. The voices of a Ukrainian soldier, a teenage Russian conscript, a mother, a pilgrim in a lost land, a flock of Monarch butterflies, a re-incarnated Descartes, waves of the ocean, a troop of baboons, a war criminal: all speak to the O-gasp of astonishment that currently holds us in its grasp. Make a stand, these poems say: when darkness is stalking us, we need to summon all the life-force we can.
Testing the limits of imagination and language, these ambitious poems face the most troubling issues of our time – war, the environment, autocracy – and explore them with empathy, intelligence and at times justified anger. A strong belief in the power of poetry to illuminate and reconfigure our world runs through the collection.
– Derek Sellen
These are poems that are alert in so many dimensions: to the poetic canon of Frost, Thomas, Sassoon and countless others; to both natural and political history; and to the modern world with its delights and horrors, its geegaws and its hard geo-political realities. All of human life is here, its blushes left very much unspared, conveyed by a poet who doesn’t grandstand his knowledge at the expense of his writing.
– Dave Wakely
Graeme Ryan writes of my native country, the United States, like a politically conscious Walt Whitman. He writes with beauty and unflinching truth and will not sacrifice one for the other. He sees into and past our bitter/divided politics and we are all the better for it. He is a comrade to all who see the arts as a starting point for resistance.
– Beau Beausoleil
In this wide-spectrum and vital collection, Graeme Ryan entices readers not only into the theme of conflict / dominance and the psyches of its protagonists, but also into the heart of a glorious natural world at constant risk of commodification and overwhelm. Poem after poem reminds us of such precarity, as well as the need to honour the stretch and salvation of human imagination. Using language that is in turns vigorous, humorous, bristling, wry, tender, and vivid, Ryan leaves us with a poignant and resonating question: ‘what compass do we turn to today?’
– Katie Griffiths
Graeme Ryan – profile
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