"The Heart"s Clockwork" is an exciting collaboration between poet Brian Hinton and the painter Julian Bell, who last year illustrated Virginia Woolf"s "The Widow and the Parrot" for the Hogarth Press, and who has designed the covers for three other Enitharmon titles. The poet and artist have previously collaborated on an edition of Emily Tennyson"s Farringford Journal ("Isle of Wight County Press"). "The Island" is central to this collection - its ravaged beauty, its rich, half-forgotten artistic heritage, the disintegration of its coastline. In "The heart"s Clockwork", this becomes a complex metaphor for contemporary society, an alchemical marriage between the land and the sea.