This stunning Caparison debut from veteran Liverpool-born, Prague-based poet John McKeown is his seventh volume, and arguably his best to date, lyrically rich and unobtrusively sublime.This is not a cheerful book. Yet the almost unrelieved gloom in John McKeown’s new collection, caused not so much by the currently dire state of the world as by a rather old-fashioned existential angst, becomes strangely addictive. It takes us into a solipsistic universe of hard-pushed metaphors and philosophic quandaries where the only inhabitant is a reconstituted version of the poète maudit. ... There are some moments of delight and beauty. McKeown has an eye for nature and the changing seasons. Kathleen McPhilemy, The High Window
