To my mind Peter Ackroyd is not an easy poet. It is not that the poetry is obscure it is just that the purpose or ideas within the poem stay at times annoyingly out of reach. He uses a sort of cut and paste style with lines; phrases, juxtaposed with each other. This works to some extent in poems like the six part "only connect" and "the small girl"

many of the poems are concerned with sleep and dreams, light or the absence of light also plays an important part. Some of the early poems seem to be parodies of writing poems or other literary forms, which are clever in their own way. Cliches and familiar phrases are prone to crop up in many of the poems and the challenge is to see if they fit within the poem.

My favourite poems in the collection are "the rooks (after Andrew Lanyon) which contains some beautiful images such as:
and so they turned and rose
Like small verbs making their line immortal

"On the third....." which is a poem made up of eight two line stanzas. Each couplet is contained within itself and has a dream like quality. Like many of the poems these stanzas could be rearranged as you the reader thinks fit.. One of the couplets;
the poem is made of sleep
speech slowed down to the nth degree.

I will come back to some of these poems as I feel they will bear re readings if the mood is right. ( )