Urban Stampede and Other Poems

This new collection of poems by F.D. Reeve includes The Urban Stampede, a dramatic narrative in poetic form, and twenty-four lyric poems. These narratives include spoken voice and singing and are shaped by a careful underlying distancing - the basic characteristic of narrative poetry. In this way, a well-known story is coolly evaluated for cultural change and linguistic difference.

In both the long poem, which is the centrepiece of this collection, and in the shorter poems, Reeve takes risks in order to explore the meaning that poetry gives to life - an immediately apprehensible vision apt in size and shape to our idea of the world, one in which the language of hands speaks to a guiding practical faith and the language of the mind leads to understanding and delight.