At the heart of this book is an image from Homer: the great shield which Hephaestus forged for the warrior, Achilles. In his second collection, Lyndon Davies attempts to imagine a shield for the complexities of the current era. What emblems would it carry? Who and what might it be protecting and against what, in a world in which oppositions are at once agonisingly entrenched and radically compromised? In the bristling arena of the shield, the narratives flash and jostle…The poems are interspersed with the powerful drawings of Penny Hallas, texts and visual images forming one troubling, many-dimensional work.