Young Rain

'The poems in Young Rain have an ease and lucidity that makes them seem almost casual, so that it is with a feeling of surprise that you realise you have been drawn into a conversation of the utmost gravity concerning the private reaches of the self, as in the sequences 'Night Music' and 'Dark Retreat'. There is nothing oppressive about them though, and the limpid rigor of the intellect they embody is leavened by the tenderness and sensuality of a third sequence, 'Amo te Solo', which possesses a lustiness that would seem at home in the Bible, but has almost disappeared from contemporary poetry.' John Koethe