Lyrical Ballads

Bill Manhire has always subscribed to Paul Valé ry' s definition of poetry as ' a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense' . In that spirit, many of the poems in this new, dazzling collection blend story and song, and do so using everyday words and phrases that – suddenly, on the page – become new and delightfully weird.

Lyrical Ballads is a many-peopled collection: the baffled inhabitants of Every Street and Intermediate Street are here, while Dracula, T.S. Eliot and Bobby Outram from Outram have walk-on parts. The collection is anchored by two long sequences that embrace awkwardness, mystery and absurdity: ' The Tobacco Tin' , a kind of folk story riding along on its own lacunae, and ' Tell You What' , a set of curmudgeonly opinions that evoke the prejudices of a fast-vanishing world.

As they notice the small collisions between wonder and everyday reality, and the trajectories of those who don' t fit easily in this world, these poems close in on the darker certainties of our lives.