The Prince of Wails

Rain, a northerly wind, the sun low, ‘everyone packing up everyone going home’ – a place which, for all the formal ingenuity and playfulness of Stephen Knight’s approaches and despite the cool authority of his ‘level, heartbreaking voice’ (Joseph Brodsky), remains endlessly receding, haunted, unforgiving, its familiarity itself a form of strangeness.

Through the ebb and flow of the poems, two rites of passage – the death of a father; late fatherhood – are the constant watermark.