"In 'Minty', one of the typically charged and capacious poems in this eagerly-awaited debut collection, a mojito glass reflects: whatever grid of bricks & wood makes up the room we happen to be sitting in is dilated & wrapped around a single focal-point; whatever portion of the sky that happens to be visible through the window becomes a convex bowl. The weather also happens, as it always does, & passes on, & brings those other places where it falls...

Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present--the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered.

In this collection, as ever with Heaney, personal memory and humble domestic objects -- a whitewash brush, a sofa, a swing -- are endowed with talismanic significance, and throughout the collection he addresses his growing concerns, which inevitably include the political situation in his native Northern Ireland, in a poetry that never ceases to be fluid, alert, and completely truthful.

"A powerful new collection from one of our leading contemporary poets, reflecting the strange and chaotic times we live in. Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity and the banalities and distortions of modern living, Nick Laird confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. At the book's heart lies the title sequence, a profound meditation on a father's dying, the reverberations...