Prince Rupert's Drop

A rare curiosity of the glass-making process, is a tear of glass at once immensely resilient yet spectacularly fragile, exploding dramatically when shattered, this is called Prince Rupert's drop. This tension - between the present beauty and sense of almost inevitable loss inherent in the things we admire most - is a key to many of the poems in this collection, and in particular to the long central poem, "Braving the Dark", written after the author's brother's death from AIDS at the age of 30. Narrative, dramatic, quietly surreal, the poems in this book hide beneath the energy of their detail a strongly suggestive sense of decay and transience.