‘Like the Living End’, an elegy occasioned by the sudden death of a school friend, is the centre-piece of this gathering of poems, completed since The Returning Sky (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Described as ‘the finest poet of his generation’ and ‘the finest poet alive when it comes to the probing of shifts in atmosphere, momentary changes in the weather of the mind’, Peter Robinson is alive as ever in these poems touched by the passing of the years, by illness and mortality, themes that he addresses with characteristic delicacy, candour, and improvised formal poise, each one in Adam Piette’s words ‘an astonishingly finely-tuned gauge for recording the pressures and processes that generate lived occasions.’