A Ghost in Waterloo Station

The poems in "A Ghost in Waterloo Station" take the everyday world as their point of departure, but the place of arrival 'is never the shore you started from'. Vivid invocations and meditations on childhood, art, and travel bring together places and people as likeable and unexpected as the wry poetic sensibility recommending them to our attention. Greece is 'a country where clarity / is inescapable unless it forces your lids shut.' Swallows enter their nests 'high on the white stacked walls 'at Indian Lodge' as if the ghost/ of a remorseful pickpocket/ were slipping a wallet/ back where it come from.' There is much humour here, and warmth, combined with an awareness of loss and the weight of history - all delivered in a voice that is distinctive in its combination of narrative, whimsy, and wry psychological observation.