Claire Crowther is a poet who is constantly breaking new ground with her innovative and genre-defying style. In Silents her subject is early cinema, the strange and wordless shadow world of gestures and expressions, populated by witches and vampyres, and impresarios such as Edison and Artaud. The poems provide a script for and a dialogue with the world of silent film, using as a springboard its marginalized figures, and the dawn of modernism. The book is illustrated by stills Crowther has selected from the Ronald Grant Archive, a fascinating collection of film memorabilia housed in an old Lambeth workhouse. A foreword by the author explores her fascination with the dark archives of cinema history, while an essay by the writer and broadcaster Kevin Jackson places these films into the larger context of modernist practice.