A fantastic new chapbook from a poet much celebrated for his tonal control and simultaneous considerations of matters mordant and gleeful. Poems here are at once funny and melancholy; the style is inimitable: Stannard takes his readers through a range of emotions via a witty and wonderful tight-rope walking act with language.
“There’s an air of luxurious melancholy about these poems, a languid play of feelings and associations, that sets them wholly against the uptight, earnest strain in British writing and that appeals to me warmly. They can be very funny, too.”
Christopher Reid
“Never have near-death experiences been rendered with such baffled detachment. Julian Stannard is unique, and I go to his poems for pleasures of indirection, appetite, curiosity and a sort of beleaguered fun that I can find nowhere else.”
Charles Boyle