The choices we make - between music and silence, impulse and security; between the ‘torn land’ and the ‘dazzling sea’ - feature strongly in Paul Henry’s fourth collection. A twenty-first century muse is rehoused in the jazz clubs and seedy hotels of European cities. Yet poems on the loss of a mother, a singer, bring back to heart what is ultimately dear to us: that early music which shapes all our longings. Paul Henry’s negotiation of these oppositions, the borders we cross in life, mark him out as a perceptive explorer of human and social relations. The Slipped Leash marks the coming of age of one of Britain’s best poets.