As like or not
there'd be a long row:
each dressed in his black
work suit,
mark of the Cyclops
on his gradual brow,
lunch in a casket
belted to his waist,
swinging, swinging
the hypothetical bird --
every last one
as trench-quiet
as the walking wounded
holders of tokens
from the broken hill.

from 'Broken Hill'

Iain Bamforth's third collection applies carnival licence to various kinds of histories: personal, symbolic, ethnographic, social -- even to a history of representations in the 101 epigrams and 'autographemes' which make up the Paris sequence 'Impediments'. Away from the city, the series of narratives of patients based on his experience as a country doctor in the south west of Scotland, and the harsher poems set in a mining town in the Australian outback contribute to the social history of their communities as they examine how far a rural doctor -- 'a fortunate man' in John Berger's phrase -- can negotiate against the sheer weight of common sense. Traditional knowledge and applied science start from different kinds of literalness:this book acknowledges the claims of both and stands at some personal risk in the breach between them. With rigour and style, intelligence is brought to bear on the natural extravagance of the spirit, and on the resilience of people living at the mercy of circumstances.