Here is a wonderful new voice, full of a spiky energy accompanied by a wild imagination. His language bristles with a sense of its own freshness. His working-class world is alive and quivering. A brilliant collection. A requiem to fathers, to the streets, to the estates; at times a smash in the face with a skateboard, laughing and 'chattin breeze'. Hawkey unravels the raw truth behind grief, alcohol dependency, and family traumas, ultimately finding ""God dwells in every man"" Hawkey writes with serious ambition: these poems are daring in their formal organisation and their political intellect. There is also a real humour here, an ironic, knowing sensibility that never gets in the way of the poems' emotional contents. Hawkey tackles difficult subjects-alcohol dependency, deprivation, and intergenerational trauma-with admirable lucidity, attuned to both their tragedy and comedy
