Selected Poems

This "Selected Poems" reveals the individual character of each poem and sequence "written only when the internal pressure demands and the slow pace of craft allows". Hard-won, not austere, the poems are marked by tenderness and passion; quiet humour, not irony, runs through them. The extended extracts from the poet's journals evoke life in Bogota, Colombia, during the Drug War, and provide a moving account of the poet's return to landscapes he shared with his late wife, the poet Frances Horovitz. The book ends with two new sequences: "Border Songs", written to be engraved on glass, and "In All My Holy Mountain", a collaboration with jazz composer, Nikki Iles.