The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

‘Crisis Actor’ chronicles various failures and farewells. It is peopled by faded heroes and deferential devotees; a hanged donkey, a bloated rat; solitary bachelors and disillusioned youths – these are the watchers, not the players. The poems are awash with rueful self-accusation and laconic scepticism. There are touching elegies, reportage and bruised, wary replayings. A blistering sequence about boxers and their fates weaves through the collection. The overwhelming sense is of life going on elsewhere, the halcyon days and brightest of years long past.

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