Using a liberating stepped verse form, Peter Redgrove opens up new paths in fresh territory, while consolidating his position as one of our finest poets of the natural world.

The questing eye of his imagination is in constant motion: the book is full of doors and stairs and wheels, the movement of light and water, the world’s daily transformations. Even his characters are shape-changers – the doctors, dentists, chemists and undertakers are all, in their way, magicians.

And, evident throughout the collection, is an undertow of mortality – notably in the extraordinarily moving poems about Redgrove’s late father: ‘his knowledge went, and mine followed, / Catch it before/It leaves like a ghost,/on these stepped verses’.