The Acts of Oblivion

The 'Acts of Oblivion' were a series of seventeenth-century laws enacted by both Parliamentarian and Royalist factions. Whatever their ends-pardoning revolutionary deeds, or expunging revolutionary speech from the record-they forced the people to forget. Against such injunctions, Paul Batchelor's poems rebel. This long-awaited second collection, The Acts of Oblivion, listens in on some of England's lost futures, such as those offered by radical but sidelined figures in the English Civil War...