For over fifty years, since he was in his early twenties, Peter Blegvad has been collecting quotations about milk, the primary substance of nutrition and of wonder. All the while his belief in the numinousness of milk has been compounded, that in its opacity and fluid density it is a thing full of both meaning and mystery.

Milk: Through a Glass Darkly gathers these quotations into a mosaic, or literary collage, consisting of almost three hundred and fifty separate passages that consider “light, smell, writing, mothers, fathers, colour, nothingness, regression, gender, race, food, cattle, ectoplasm, anti-matter, the moon, sex and insanity amongst other things”.

It is, in its enigmatic way, a kind of Lactatus Logico-Philosophicus…