Publisher's Synopsis
It is not surprising that Les Murray, with his sense of place and appropriate language, has championed the abundant, hard-edged and largely urban poetry of Jamie Grant:
'For just under three decades, ' he declares, 'Jamie Grant has been writing poems of scrupulous craftsmanship and unblinking intelligence, poems which pay acute atten-tion to the contours of experience. His richly diverse longer pieces are filled with perceptions, meditative discoveries, precise imagery and character; they are balanced by lapidary short poems which often bring a strong dimension of moral concern to points of needle light. An equally enjoyable dimension is playful humour, while the formal inventiveness of his work seems nearly as unlimited as its range of
subjects.'
Grant does for the city some of the things that Murray, with his rural vision, has done for the land. There is something of the classicist about him, of a Hesiod who has moved to an Athens full of promise and deceit. His is, in Brian Turner's words, an
'elegant, measured, pithy, clever, epigrammatic, understanding'. This is the first comprehensive selection of his work to appear in Great Britain.
