The Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light is Ian Parks’ first full collection of poems since the acclaimed Citizens in 2017. It will be launched in October 2025.
Ian Parks is from Mexborough. An academic and a poet, he has run the Read to Write project in Doncaster for a decade. He is the editor of Versions of the North: Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry and the Selected Poems of Harold Massingham. His translations of the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy were a Poetry Book Society Choice. His poems have appeared in Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Morning Star, and Poetry (Chicago). He has been a Hawthornden Fellow since 1991 and has held residencies at Gladstone’s Library and at De Montfort, Leicester. His Selected Poems 1983-2023 is published by Calder Valley Poetry.
‘A real poetic gift: pure poetry written as though coming ready-made from outside him.’
– John Powell-Ward
‘Parks is not simply a poet of the emotions… he is compellingly adroit at showing how the concrete and the human build, contain, and refract these emotions. And that adroitness is shown, abundantly clearly in the kind of ‘simple’ language that Frost would have recognised, driven by a daunting yet always subtle sense of rhythm.’
– Ian Pople
‘An instantly-recognisable voice: spare, lyrical, memorable, and intense. Whatever subject he addresses – historical, political, romantic – he transforms through the sheer force of his poetic identity.’
– Donald Davie
‘It is no mean feat to write this well about ‘political’ subject matter without letting partisan emotion overwhelm the poetry. Parks does so with admirable restraint and subtlety, and by placing it within the broader context of English history with its still-palpable struggles and scars of previous bloody conflicts.’
– Matthew Paul
‘Reading a poem by Ian Parks is like hearing your name uttered in the din of a public place: you hear it regardless of the background noise.’
– Peter Dale
Crooked Spire Press 