The prevailing mood of The Pelt of Wasps is one of unease, often elegiac, tinged with pleasure, barbed with pain. The poems hold a worried balance between celebration and anxiety, restraint and longing. The book includes David Constantine's long poem Lady Hamilton and the Elephant Man, recently broadcast on Radio 3. David Constantine writes: 'Wasps, many hundreds of them, are pressing against the window of a room in which a lamp has been left on all night. That poem finishes: I bless my life: that so much wants in. Most of the poems in this new collection have to do with the pressure of phenomena, occurrences and other people on an individual consciousness, and the determined will of that individuality to press back and extend itself. The poems continue old obsessions, love and loss, but these in reality are never repetitious since we are always, each time, older. The long poem Lady Hamilton and the Elephant Man belongs properly with the others in this book (and with Caspar Hauser and my novel Davies). In it I have put together four figures, in an underworld, and let them interconnect. Much of my poetics, it seems to me, consists in placing things oddly side by side. Still not so oddly as life does.'