^{The following extract is from an article in The Spectator, published 10 November 2018:}

Andrew Wynn Owen, a young Fellow of All Souls, has produced an exhilarating first book of poems, The Multiverse (Carcanet, £9.99). It won’t appeal to austere modernists who value solemn obscurity. Owen writes in strictly observed metres and in disciplined rhyme. He has an almost miraculous ear for the sounds of words and their harmonies together. There is bounding vitality, surgical precision and coquettish wit in every stanza. Like all great poets in the making, Owen is a magpie, who plucks eye-catching sparklers from old masters such as Herbert, Hardy and Auden. I hear the exuberant, taunting laugh of Byron in some rhymes. Several of my favourites, such as ‘A Sign at CERN’, are about science. I know that it will make a wonderful Christmas present because I have given it to three people — an Oscar-winning screenwriter, a former cabinet minister and a retired head of English at Wycombe Abbey School for Girls — who have all revelled in Owen’s glorious ingenuity and joy-of-life.

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