Peter Dale combines intimacy of address and a personal colloquial idiom with remarkable skill in formal verse. He is interested in bringing his subjects - love, relationships, memory, all kinds of daily exchange - directly to the reader, without fuss and with thoughtful craft and conviction. The precision of his writing matches its intensity of feeling. Diffractions begins with new poems and ends with a collection of lively and entertaining epigrams. Between these, his published collections appear in chronological sequence. The whole assembles 50 years of elegant, incisive and moving work by a leading British poet of rare skill.