The Presence

This book is the winner of the Wales book of the year. Loss, grief and love are the themes of this remarkable memoir from one of Britain’s most distinguished poets. Some months after Dannie Abse’s wife Joan died in a car accident in June 2005, he began to write a diary which is both a record of present grief and a portrait of marriage which lasted more than fifty years. It is an extraordinary document, painful but celebratory; funny as well as sad, bursting with joy as well as sorrow and full of a deep understanding of what it means to be human.