The ghost train

Both personal and historical ghosts inhabit the poems in this Irishman's first new collection since 1986His poems range in setting from the Irish Border counties to the Dardanelles, from the Smuggler's Restaurant, Carrickfergus, to Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, from Belfast to the racecourses of England. They include typically direct and honest love poems, elegies for his father, poems with a sporting emphasis, and a sequence which poignantly reflects the joys and anxieties of expectant parenthood against a background of violence and ceasefire in the North of Ireland.