Stations of the Heart

Powerful and evocative poems of love, loss, and memory which range from contemporary England to a Scottish childhood, from the State of England to the pieties and pressures of growing up in a religious culture in which expression and pleasure were highly problematic. The poems are technically accomplished, using traditional forms such as the sonnet, the villanelle, as well as free verse, but coming back again and again to the base line, the industry standard, of the ten-syllable line. The influences of Heaney, Larkin, W.S. Graham and the Romantic tradition are evident, as well as the more recent influences of the richly gifted younger generation of Scottish poets born around the early 1960s. Other aesthetic co-ordinates are provided by Vermeer, Stanley Spencer and Alfred Wallis, with a visit to the grave of John Keats in Rome providing one of the collection's defining moments. A strong theme in the collection is the intimacies of family life, with tender and at times anguished recollections of parents, moving celebrations of fatherhood, and often humorous and down to earth poems about relationships in the context of modern professional life. In the spirit of the Romantic tradition, different places often provide the settings for moments of insight or resolution with nature acting as a constant backdrop of reassurance that whatever darkness there may be, it is not the darkness of the abyss, but the darkness before dawn.