Matt Simpson's poems have been praised for the vivid way they link up to tell an evolving story. His earlier books gave us a brine-tangy and unsentimental record of a Bootle back-to-back upbringing in a family of seafarers, culminating in a witty portrait-of-the-artist as a working-class lad up at Cambridge. Catching up with History begins with poems showing Simpson still rooted in those formative experiences, but moving out from and beyond them into the life he lives now. The poems about Liverpool are more historically and politically engaged, sometimes passionately and sometimes humorously so: witness his hilarious Scouse parody of Eliot's Prufrock, or Gifts of Language in which he acknowledges his poetry's debt to the inherently poetic qualities of the Liverpool lingo. But there are also moving love poems and poems celebrating friendships written with his characteristic wit and tact.