Overview
Natural landscapes through which love and lyricism flicker and flare are the backdrop for these poems. The sparrows, pigeons, and magpies of the urban periphery lighten the atmosphere as they edge the collection toward the city in the humorous elegy "Bird List," while "Hand Held," a personal and vulnerable piece, delicately celebrates the author's experience of fathering a child with severe learning difficulties. The collection is filled out with pieces of love and memory, affirming in the end the luck intrinsic to survival.
Reviews
"Richard Price retains an individual voice in which intense feelings of love, or dislocation, are packed into often short, complex lyrics. There is a tension in reading his poems which is created by his care for words, by the integrity of his distillation." —Carol Ann Duffy
Author Biography
Richard Price is the youngest of the Informationist group of poets, and a founder of the magazines associated with them, Gairfish and Southfields. He is the head of Modern British Collections at the British Library in London.