In Waterlight

Donald Atkinson's award-winning first collection of poetry was published over fifteen years ago, since when three further collections have appeared. This present volume selects work from all four collections, much of it sparingly revised and freshly presented - in particular the semi-autobiographical A Sleep of Drowned Fathers (Peterloo, 1989) - and concludes with a substantial sequence of new poems, Journey to Mozambique. Of these new poems, Mimi Khalvati writes: "I like the warmth, the melancholy, and the colours of this sequence; and how even the harsh brutalities are filtered through a celebratory tenderness." Although Atkinson speaks in a variety of distinct voices - ironical, surreal, reflective - his style is always recognizable; the whole oeuvre is "brined in wit - and the salt is good".