This collection of poems are by turns humorous, painful, spiky and eloquent, recalling Gareth Reeves's father, the poet and critic James Reeves. The collection culminates in a sequence of fourteen lyrics about his father's partial-sightedness. For Gareth Reeves the anxiety of influence is a filial matter. In other poems the quirks of memory stimulate a difficult truth-seeking - about an organ-playing chemistry teacher, an Oxford suicide and odd-ball, a black American con-artist, an expatriate Marxist Englishman in California, about teaching Vietnam draftees, about selling blood in pre-Junta Greece - whilst in poems such as "The Cockroach Sang in the Plane-tree", "High Life" and "Gaps" (about the poet Norman Cameron), the concern with mortality finds bleak and disconcerting expression.
- ISBN10 1857540115
- ISBN13 9781857540116
- Publish Date 22 July 1993
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 16 April 2014
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
- Format Paperback (UK Trade)
- Pages 64
- Language English