The title sequence in John Welch’s new collection evokes early life experiences, some traumatic - material that had previously featured in his prose memoir Dreaming Arrival (Shearsman 2008). In Folly’s Shade also brings together for the first time thirty unrhymed sonnets, dating mainly from the 1970s. Whether suggesting the light ancient coinage can shed on contemporary politics or moving through and reflecting on urban landscapes, there is throughout the book a recurring preoccupation with the ambiguities involved in the business of being a poet and above all the sheer oddness of us as a species inveigled into language and unable to get out of it.