Simon Perril is a poet, critic, and collagist. He is Professor of Poetic Practice, and heads Leicester Centre for Creative Writing at DMU. His poetry publications include The Slip, In the Final Year of My 40s, Beneath: a Nekyiad, Archilochus on the Moon, Newton’s Splinter, Nitrate, A Clutch of Odes, and Hearing is Itself Suddenly a Kind of Singing. His poetry is published in Magazines such as PN Review, Long Poem Magazine, Cordite Review, Jacket, Poetry Wales, Tears in the Fence, Fortnightly Review, Blackbox Manifold, Shearsman and Angel Exhaust. As a critic he has written widely on contemporary poetry, editing the books The Salt Companion to John James, and Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling. And he has written many book chapters (for CUP, Blackwells, Palgrave) and articles on contemporary poets. Alongside his writing, Simon has developed a visual practice in collage and video. He is currently inside a large poetry project entitle The Diver’s Manual, which will consist of a quartet of books. The project is highly interdisciplinary, blending art history, philosophy, Occult ‘science’, and the history of Marseille’s significance as the only port in the ‘free zone’ of Occupied France – an escape route for some of the most influential artists and intelligentsia of the Twentieth Century. This historical moment of refugees, ideas and exiles interests me for the oblique light it sheds on our own time