Edwards has openly acknowledged the influence of poets such Robert Duncan and John Ashbery on his work. He is drawn to the chance elements thrown up by techniques such as collage and cut-ups; a case in point being his mis-translations of Stéphane Mallarmé, published as A Fluke (2005), a tour de force that gave primacy to the look and shape of Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard while dispensing entirely with its semantic content.

After Naptime, subtitled ‘A Poem, Profusely Illustrated’, continues in this vein, playfully incorporating scanned quotes and images from various sources that unfurl across each double-page spread. Fashioned as an old-time pageant, and sporting a cast that includes Inspector Bucket, Mr Snagsby, and sundry letters of the alphabet, the theatrical ‘acts’ of the long poem variously hint at a derring-do tale, cut from the cloth of nineteenth-century ghost stories and boys’ own adventures. In veering wildly between sense and nonsense, After Naptime cheerily doffs its hat to an earlier avant-garde that placed language at the forefront of the action. More ‘visual’ poem than ‘poem’, its ideal reader will be one versed in the visual language of John Warwicker’s The Floating World (2008), Tom Phillips’s A Humument (1970), or the collage novels of Max Ernst.