In Photopoetry 1845–2015: A Critical History, Michael Nott delineates in compelling detail the development of photopoetry over the last 170 years, paying particular attention to the structural, stylistic, and theoretical changes that the form has undergone. Nott's study begins with the Victorian scrapbook's pioneering use of photographs to illustrate poetry, and concludes with Robert Crawford's and Norman MacBeath's collaborative small press book Chinese Makars (2016). Between these two poles, Nott turns his attention to the work of relatively well-known figures such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney, as well as less familiar names and publications, including Philip Henry Delamotte's early pictorial photobook The Sunbeam: A Book of Photographs from Nature (1859), the Anglo-Indian poet Adela Nicolson's Songs from the Garden of Karma (1908), and Thom and Ander Gunn's collaborative photopoetry book Positives (1966). This broad spectrum of work provides a solid framework in which Nott broaches a range of issues, from representations of race, gender, landscape and nationality to more theoretical questions concerning space, memory, exile, and travel.

A more general concern of Nott's is what he refers to as the “serendipitous” interaction of poem and photograph, which, he suggests, “requires the reader/viewer to reach, work, and imagine in order to make productive connections between text and image” (3). This “symbiotic combination of poem and photograph” not only “places the reader/viewer at the centre of the work,” Nott proposes, but also posits the photopoem as “a multisensory” text that is “reliant upon the independence and interdependence of text and image” (14).

Nott develops these overarching claims for the photopoem with incisive lucidity throughout Photopoetry 1845–2015. His reading of Paul Muldoon and Norman McBeath's Plan B (2009), to highlight just one of numerous examples, is especially convincing in the way it explicates the subtle yet complex relations that manifest between Muldoon's poems and McBeath's photographs. Perhaps even more illuminating is Nott's discussion of Muldoon's and McBeath's “artist's box” Light Box (2015), which, as well as convincingly showing the “thematic and metaphorical links” that occur between poem and photograph, also considers the possibilities of photopoetry beyond the confines of the codex format (237–38).

The discussion of Allen Ginsberg's Fulcrum book Angkor Wat (published by Stuart Montgomery's Fulcrum Press in 1968 with photographs by Alexandra Lawrence) is, by comparison, less convincing. Nott's reading of Ginsberg's book-length poem in conjunction with Lawrence's photographs leans a bit too heavily on Ian Davidson's ideas of the rhizome in Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry (2007). Consequently, Ginsberg's “polyvocal collage” poem is reduced to something more univocal wherein the contiguous timbres and juxtaposing frames of reference – surrealism, Buddhism, militarism, imperialism, sexuality, and mind expansion – are muted. Thus the very symbiosis that Nott champions throughout his book, in this instance at least, seems to diminish rather than enhance the fruitful interdependence of text and image that he advocates. Indeed, despite his claim that “a single structure” photopoem such as Ankor Wat “enhances the connections between poem and photographs,” and establishes “new thematic and structural links between them,” the convincing, detailed examination of the book's photographs so characteristic elsewhere in Photopoetry 1845–2015 is lacking (182).

This perhaps raises a question that is never directly answered in Photopoetry 1845–2015: why photography? Notwithstanding some allusions to Barthes's familiar trope of the punctum, Nott never explicitly conveys what it is about photography that sets it apart from other visual mediums often used in conjunction with poetry, such as drawing, painting, or etching. An insightful consideration of Ezra Pound and imagism goes some way toward addressing this question. Introduced by Nott in the second half of his book, Pound's imagist poetics are invoked to explain the merits of the photographic medium and contextualize the visual immediacy and “suspended action” of twentieth-century photopoetic forms (126). It is, however, something of a shame that Nott's consideration of American modernist poetics does not stretch as far as objectivist poetry. One can't help wonder what Louis Zukofsky's tacit suggestion of the poem as a camera – “The rays of the object brought to a focus” – might have brought to Nott's thesis.Footnote ¹ Indeed, Zukofsky might have helped Nott address how the visual poetics of photopoetry sit in relation to the paradigm shift that occurs in more radical forms of mid-twentieth-century poetry. According to Marjorie Perloff, there is, from the 1960s onwards, a significant turn from Pound's imagistic model (and a faith in “imagefull language” more generally) in favour of a “deconstruction of the image” and a concern with the image in relation to the word rather than the real.Footnote ² Just what the consequences of this shift might be for the photopoem is not part of Nott's account of the form. This omission might be because Nott's examples of mid- to late twentieth-century photopoetry are, relatively speaking, more conventional in their symbiotic combinations of poem and text compared to more avant-garde forms such as concrete and visual poetry.

This is, however, not so much a criticism about Photopoetry 1845–2015 as an acknowledgement of how much Nott's book stimulates and provokes reflection; not only on the manifold relationships that have occurred between photography and poetry, but on poetry and its complex relationships with the image more generally. In this respect Nott's book is a key resource for understanding and rethinking the illuminating interstices of poetry and photography. Scrupulously researched, compellingly argued, and rich in detail, Photopoetry 1845–2015 will remain a foundational work for future scholarship keen to explore the innovative ways in which text and photograph might, as Nott so eloquently puts it, “blend, clash, contradict, embolden, evoke, and resist each other” as photopoetic form (4).