Imagine a character of our time whose affinities are with the Silver Poets of Ancient Rome. A person at the pivot of middle age; cosmopolitan, yet jaundiced – a hedonist with greying temples and expanding belly … This is the persona whose voice permeates First Time in Japan, enabling Anthony Howell to speak without calculating the soundness of the view expressed. As always his poems are distilled from irony, wit and an intensity of poetic craft, creating another unsettling fusion of modernism and bravura tradition.