Third Day: New and Selected Poems

Third Day is a selection from the poems Grey Gowrie has written between 1958 and the present day. At the centre of the book is the sequence ‘The Domino Hymn: Poems from Harefield’, first published to great acclaim in 2005. This work draws on the best part of a year spent in hospital when the author, dying of a virus on the heart, was jolted back to life and writing by the surgical gift of a heart from a living donor. ‘Marches’, poems of the post-operative years, follows, inspired by the country between England and Wales and the borderlands we all occupy between being and non-being. The book ends with ‘From Primrose Hill’ a meditation on contemporary London.