In Walking Out of the World, triolets, quatrains and villanelles are interspersed with finely modulated free verse, culminating in the striking sequence ‘The Sentences of Death’. Mead’s curiously fascinating poems, with their beguiling echoes of the modern masters and their obsessive focus on uncomfortable truths, are mordantly witty as they confront life and death with eyes wide open. Mead is a poet who, once read, is not forgotten.