Author Description

At the Foot of the Mountain is a wonder of compression and transformation. These poems are distilled from decades of living, reading, thinking and feeling. They have an intelligence and tigerish grace that can only be achieved by a poet who has taken on, in every way, the hard work of writing. Here readers will encounter a dung-beetle Dante who pitches his swag at the foot of the mountain; lucid and powerful grappling with the endless strangeness of our embodiment; sane and wry poems on the inescapable absurdities of what is briefly our present day; and sharp, aphoristic lines that remind me powerfully of Blake's 'Proverbs of Hell'. This is a book with a rare depth of humanity and spirit that bears witness to its writer's fearless perceptiveness, and which always carries itself with compassion and wit. - Graeme Miles