Lost and Found
Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1997
Five years after the disappointment with Entertaining Fates, Carcanet brought out my first book written after ceasing to live in England. A majority of the poems in Lost and Found, of which 'The Yellow Tank' is one, are set in Japan and explore what Peter Swaab in the TLS described as 'an eventful midlife, encompassing emigration to Japan, divorce, remarriage and major surgery.' This sums up well the book's thematic material, but, as Peter Carpenter noted in his review, 'the beauty of the poems is the impossibility of dissevering the personal and the public.' Lost and Found received a good handful of positive notices. James Keery in PN Review described it as my 'best collection, by a long chalk', adding that 'it rekindles interest in his previous work.' Alan Brownjohn in The Sunday Times found 'something genuinely powerful and disturbing' in the book and ended by praising the sequence about my brain tumour operation because it brought a 'talent for clear and startling imagery into play' which made the poems 'ring painfully true.' This all came as a relief after the almost total silence that greeted its predecessor.
Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1997