Tom Lowenstein’s first full-length book of poems shows his development from meditative and hermetic earlier poems, through formalism to a mode of controlled ironic wildness, in which he explores in concrete detail the fantasies that emerge from metaphor and parodic speech. Unnervingly precise comedy is only one aspect of his gift; in the narrative poems which end the book he deals excitingly with ethnology and myth.

Tom Lowenstein was born near London in 1941. After completing his education at Cambridge University, he taught for six years in English secondary schools. He has taught English and creative writing at Northwestern University, worked for the Alaska State Museum and during 1975-6 spent a year in an Alaskan Eskimo village, recording and translating its legends and histories. His translations of `Eskimo Poems’ appeared in 1973.