Deceptively relaxed in tone, these verse letters - sometime serious, sometimes whimsical - are addressed to people who, for various reasons, have been of importance in Neil Curry’s life. Ranging from Angela Carter to the Venerable Bede and from Odysseus to Gilbert White’s tortoise, they cover topics as diverse as smallpox and the paintings of Vermeer, landscape-gardening, the King James Bible and Eddie Stobart’s lorries on the M6. There has not been a collection of verse letters of this nature since the Epistles of the Roman poet Horace and, fittingly, it is to Horace that the final letter is addressed, partly by way of apology.