Notions

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Constantly inventive and unerringly precise, the poems in John Kelly’s debut collection reveal an author at home with both the stand-alone lyric and the longer, apparently improvisational pieces that contribute so much to this book’s extraordinary brio and style. The breadth of cultural reference is perhaps a given, but Kelly’s real achievement is to make sense of a sometimes teeming eld of vision. From the natural world to the troubled north of his youth, through encounters with art - and its creators - to poems that chart the seismic changes that come with love, fatherhood and loss, Notions is a book full of humour and play, wonder and woundedness.

When you bow your head to the soloing thrush,

lit like an old friend’s soul
in the bones of a silver birch.

• from ‘Winter’s Blessing