In his remarkably assured debut, Simon Thompson shows us the place where he lives, where everything inevitably comes back to the centre. The predominant impression is of a man, sometimes seen from a long way off, moving indecisively towards some overwhelming question. The poems are driven by images of the north: the wealth of rivers, the sodium lights of long winters, the broken concrete foundations of abandoned mills; these are the things that are the source of the poet’s ideas. Having said that, the poems lie beyond an easy theoretical grasp; the world itself is too wild, too unruly to be contained by theory. The poems seem to say nothing but the energy contained within themselves is permanent; everything else is temporary, subject to erosion.