Böcker av Brian Johnstone

Visiting former theatres of war, remote landscapes of Scotland, France and Greece, pre-war classrooms and the nightmares of childhood, this title features poems that are not afraid to gaze long and hard at what has been deliberately concealed, erased, or dismissed as worthless - the past with all its demons, and its sad domestic litanies.

A grounded yet playful collection from an assured poet, flexing his muscles into newer territory. As well as the deep lineage of rural landscapes that populated previous collections, here Johnstone treats us to an extended trip to the circus, where the glitz and thrill of the big top and its stunts are peeled back to allow us into the physical and emotional rigour that forms the show's framework. Elsewhere poems transport you more literally through music, movie and TV history, around Europe and into the distant past, again balancing between illusion and the tension that supports it in the more mundane real world. And throughout, the tone and language also plays an ingenious balancing act between the structured, the rhyming and the informal. This is a personal and expansive collection, honest and exploratory.

Family revelations prompt Brian Johnstone to turn a poet's eye on his 1950s childhood and explore his parents' lives before and during World War II. In a memoir sure to resonate with baby-boomers and anyone who has lost and found unknown relatives, Brian vividly evokes a post-war upbringing, under whose conventional surface so much was hidden.