The talking horse and the sad girl and the village under the sea

The book reveals a poet of great versatility and formal talent: all the gifts so admired in the authors prose are in strong evidence here - the humanity of his voices, the dark humour and the uncanny ventriloquism, Here are bittersweet love-lyrics, lucid and bold new versions of Horace, comic set-pieces, lullabies, wry postmodern shenanigans and an entire John Buchan novel condensed to five pages.