Ian Patterson's Shell Vestige Disputed presents poems which take great pleasure in the mystery of language and the amenability of meaning. Patterson writes with a clear focus on the stress and intonation of words and phrases, crafting complex and puzzling poems which are reminiscent of Prynne and the English surrealists. Shell Vestige Disputed is a collection full of beauty and surprise.

Ian Patterson taught English for almost twenty years at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he is now a Life Fellow. His academic writing includes Guernica and Total War (Profile, 2007) and numerous essays on twentieth-century writers; his translations include Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Proust, Finding Time Again (Penguin, 2004). He has published over a dozen works of poetry, including Time to Get Here: Selected Poems 1969-2002 (Salt, 2003) and Marsh Air (Equipage, 2019). His poem 'The Plenty of Nothing' was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2017. He lives in Suffolk.