Never a Joseph, nor even a shepherd or wise man
but some surly angel, train-bearer,
or escort to a king, without a line to spin,
to fill a tableau or swell a curtain call,
so fitting them for life far better than
brief village stardom might. Enter, shuffling,
as if nudged into view by war's statistics:
History's full-backs and reserves.
Cannon fodder talent-spotted early.


from 'Extras'
           

Nevermore is an elegy for lost times and threatened things. It celebrates recollection and the 'immortality of youth', and youth's passions: for natural history (as in the group of bird poems entitled 'Plato's Aviary'), for the naive curiosity and lust of adolescent 'love', for adventuresome escape (as in the docu-poem rhapsody 'Lines from an Aran Journal'), and for the elusive prize of poetry itself.

The poems traffic across borders, between the 1950s and 1960s and the present, between Wales, Scotland and Ireland, fish and fowl, coastal town and wilderness, material realities and
transcendent dreams, and confused claims of cultural identity, Welsh and Scottish and neither.

Nevermore speaks from a world where family as rural tribe, rooted in place, has given way to a rootless diaspora, its history at risk of erasure, for worse, and for better. It is post-United Kingdom, in a spirit that, if it could make anything happen, would will the good republic into being.