Thirst: a collection of poetry

Michael Glover's abundant ninth collection of poetry finds him adopting various guises in a range of places, mental and physical. In Ireland, he squares up to a rabble of indolently imperious sheep, those 'ragged kings and queens' of a sequence of poems called Achill Soundings, all written in a cottage once owned by the Nobel-Prize-winning German novelist Heinrich Böll. In Dear Bill, a sequence part written in Andalucia, he pays homage to New Jersey poet and paediatrician William Carlos Williams. In other sequences, he makes word-shapes from the odd minimalist music of the 20th century Austrian composer Anton Webern, explores the testy to-ings and fro-ings of human relationships in poems addressed to the mysterious Violet, and pays sombre tribute to a girl who died far, far too young.