Vincent Van Gogh was an impassioned reader of poetry. What is more, he loved the exalted idea of poets. In 1888, less than two years before he took his own life, he entitled a new painting of Eugène Boch, a young Belgian painter, 'The Poet' because he wanted to define such a being visually.

In his new collection, the poet Michael Glover, in a suite of forty poems, not only writes about some of Van Gogh's greatest paintings, but also interrogates his turbulent nature as a man, revolutionary artist and lover of poetry.