This provocative debut collection, some years in the making, is often inspired by the poet’s reading of American literature: the conversational tone of Frank O’Hara and the long-lined garrulity of Allen Ginsberg, as well as the models of masculinity handed out to us by Hollywood characters like John Wayne.
This is also a writer who casts a cold eye on the natural world, at one point lauding a landscape and the next, mourning its depredation. There is also a considerable amount of humour here, along with astute satire and insightful character poems. It is elegy and satire for a lost industrial age whilst artfully resists the cliché minefield of such a subject in South Wales.
David Foster-Morgan is not an easy or an obvious voice, but his work repays the careful attention of thoughtful readers.