These are poems which welcome distraction and which seem to have a lasting interest in registering and reproducing a sense of the uncanny. The strategies adopted veer between lyric mannerism and reconstructed second-hand words and, taken together, chart a lazy form of investigative political thinking through the last three decades of the twentieth century.

Ian Patterson taught English for almost twenty years at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he is now a Life Fellow. His academic writing includes Guernica and Total War (Profile, 2007) and numerous essays on twentieth-century writers; his translations include Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Proust, Finding Time Again (Penguin, 2004). He has published over a dozen works of poetry, including Time to Get Here: Selected Poems 1969-2002 (Salt, 2003) and Marsh Air (Equipage, 2019). His poem 'The Plenty of Nothing' was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2017. He lives in Suffolk.