Great Regulars: This week's poem, The God of Love,

is written as an eye-witness account, almost in defiance of the quoted epigraph. "I found them," the narrator declares authoritatively of the herd of musk-oxen, as if reporting on a field trip. After the crisp, distant precision of the initial scene-setting, the threat to the oxen is registered on the reader's skin in a little shiver as we're shown the wolves with their "ears flattened against the wind". This movement is intensified by the next stanza's dramatic "whirlpool of wolves".

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: The God of Love by George MacBeth

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