Tom Pickard's poems of love, sex, politics and war are searing in their directness and emotional power.

Tom Pickard's Ballad of Jamie Allan recounts the true adventures of an eighteenth-century gypsy musician who lived on the English?Scottish Borders and died in Durham jail, serving a life sentence for stealing a horse.

As does Paul McCartney. This is a true crime story with a happy ending. "I am an old admirer of Tom Pickard's poetry and believe as does Basil Bunting that he is one of the most live and true poetic voices in Great Britain" Allen Ginsberg."

As the collection draws to a close, the poems return to the familiar horizon of Solway Firth, the estuary 'where winter migrants gather in long black lines', and the world, cooled now both inside and out, quells: a curlew gifts its 'estuary ...