Of Love, Death, and the Sea-Squirt

In Chris Greenhalgh's delightful, yet disturbing second book, we encounter a cannibalistic wife, a man trapped in a valley of women, a conjuror who spirits himself away, and a kinky mortician. There are poems on themes of love and death. The emblem of the seasquirt haunts the collection: a creature which, having fulfilled its life's task of finding a rock to cling onto and make its home, proceeds in an act of appalling self-slaughter to eat its own brain. The vivid imagery and narrative excitement which characterized his first book, Stealing the Mona Lisa (available from Dufour), feature strongly again in poems which sparkle with irreverent comedy and fierce satire. These poems explore the darkening spaces of public and private worlds in a language at once sophisticated, sensual, and alive.