The Fire that Never Goes Out

In this expansive new collection, Tom Furniss lets his vivid poetic imagination roam in time and place. From the fields and forests of his Northamptonshire childhood in the early 1960s to the moorlands and hills surrounding his present-day home on the fringe of the Scottish Highlands, his roving, eidetic eye alights upon playtime dens and antiquated school buses, upon granite peaks and glacial valleys, dry stone walls and wind-whipped winter trees. In language that is both colloquial and precise, he recalls parents, siblings, old friends and former lovers, as well as "secret paths and ancient ways", finding sounds, scents and sights that link present and past, "tinged with the taste of memories". Alongside personal history goes an awareness of deeper geological time and a dialogue with poetic precursors, from Frost and Yeats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, all the way back to the mid-8th century ancient Chinese Tang dynasty poet Tu Fu.