“Here is a collection that demands and repays re-reading. Moving and aesthetically rewarding, the poems are informed by a deeply compassionate intelligence and shaped by a thoughtful yet unobtrusive craft. The haunting presence in these poems is the history of human nature – timeless, yet driven and defined by time’s passage; universal, yet inescapably relevant to private individual conscience. In addition to the uncharted watersheds of our private histories, Adrian Blamires draws unostentatiously on a knowledge and love of Greek myth, history, and English literature to make poems of acute contemporary relevance, in a language at once lyrical and demotic. In this lucid and deeply humane first collection, with its incontrovertible ‘clarity of loss’. Blamires offers us poem after poem as individual acts of restitution.” - - - Elizabeth Garret