Silence: A Literary History by Kate McLoughlin has recently been published by Oxford University Press. It comes in at 720 pages and is described, properly, as ‘A majestic literary history, revealing the power and possibilities of silence found in literary works… It traces silences over twelve centuries of English literature, from the solitary states of exile on icy seas described in Anglo-Saxon poems to searches for silence in our own Age of Pings.” https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silence-Literary-History-Kate-McLoughlin/dp/019285562X

Rather unusually, it includes my work, and one of my asemic poems at that. Pretty remarkable really, and an honour. The work in question is taken from my Selected Scribbling and Scrawling from Zimzalla press https://zimzalla.co.uk/051-sj-fowler-scribbling-and-scrawling-2nd-edition/

”Illuminating the intellectual and cultural influences shaping our relationships with silence and explores the paradoxical ways in which authors create silences through words. Medieval lyricists express complex theological notions through simple lullabies shushing babies to sleep. Renaissance sonneteers protest their tongue-tiedness in dazzling displays of verbal ingenuity. Shakespeare creates silences that stage violent misogyny, calculating statecraft, the hurt of having to grow up and hard-won equanimity. Out of political favour at the Restoration, Milton dreams of a silent paradise. Wordsworth and Coleridge are dumbfounded by the sublimity of God's creation. Jane Austen deflates pomposities with perfectly-timed pauses. Tennyson composes a three-thousand-line poem about the death of his best friend leaving him lost for words. Virginia Woolf repeatedly writes a novel about the things that people don't say.”