The Black River collects C K Stead’s most recent poems, written over the last eighteen months. The brilliant and moving focus of the collection is its final sequence, written after Stead suffered a stroke which temporarily affected his ability to read and write. Here fragmentary poems poignantly explore frailty and the closeness of death, the challenge of words and language, and the relieved and excited recovery of the power to use them. The remainder of the collection, written subsequently, is more sombre in tone than earlier work and shows a constant awareness of the ‘black river’ of mortality; but this is balanced by a joy in the vivid pleasures of the senses and of the physical world seen as all the more precious because of its fragility.