A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel

David Starkey's "A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel" is a far ranging and fearless collection, of great humour and intelligence and sympathy. Ranging through philosophy and art and history - both global and domestic - these poems skillfully chronicle the darkness that is our current age and condition, and the pinpricks of light that may show us the way out. When a poem called 'Hitler's Art' begins 'I hate to admit it, but he wasn't bad', you know the poet isn't afraid to look at anything. The great philosophers weave in and out of these poems, hand in hand with the great criminals, and David Starkey is a step behind them, missing nothing. There's a dark joy to this book; it's feverish and beautiful, 'a glimmering aria', as one poem says, 'to everything that's yet to go wrong'.