A major event, this volume presents some 40 years of work. Corcoran has as wide a range and as rich a vocabulary as any poet now writing. He possesses a flawless ear, a fresh eye for image and detail, penetrating analysis and a storyteller's gift. He can shift registers suddenly, from lyric to formal mode to common speech, and even a snatch of song... Kelvin Corcoran is one of the rare true poets. Reading him is a privilege and a pleasure, a new awareness. -David Wevill Corcoran is a superbly skilled lyricist. -Frances Leviston, The Guardian Kelvin Corcoran has allied a strikingly individual intelligence to a genuinely musical sensibility. -Don Paterson, The Observer The 'straight music' of the English lyrical tradition drives these poems that are honed, hard, elegant and economic. Then, suddenly, brilliance flashes out against the grain, in the flaws. It is 'the ripped voice makes us free'. -Rosmarie Waldrop Corcoran is at the front of contemporary poetry: the lyric grace of his language is threaded with an historical perspective that raises the poetry far beyond the world of a localised present. -Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence Kelvin Corcoran's recent work inhabits the imagination as a distinct sphere of abundance, drawn from reality as a celebration of the true scope of the mind. And the instrument of this is a written eloquence which takes in the past of poetry and of the spirit as a freshly lived condition. -Peter Riley, PN Review