After Beethoven

From Lenin Park, Hanoi, to the Humber, from wars near or remote in space in time, these poems come with their news of aftermath, and of the worlds which survive and recrudesce after the sky has fallen. These poems are touched by death, but more stubbornly by life. They are ordered in progression from shared to private history and out again; from foreign and exotic to familiar, domestic landscapes and out again to the world, the voice informed by the specifics of place. They conclude with "A Short Story", a long poem that extends the narrative line that runs though Brackenbury's work from her first book.