​Life’s a canon is your most unified and emotionally coherent collection to date. It reads as a memoir-in-poems, but with the compression, tonal restraint, and psychological acuity that characterise your best work. The book traces a life shaped—and at times distorted—by the piano: as identity, obsession, coping mechanism, spiritual practice, and emotional currency.

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The sequence is remarkably consistent in voice: reflective, self‑interrogating, unsentimental, and musically structured. It is also your most narratively transparent book, yet it never lapses into prose. The poems remain poems—tight, distilled, and formally disciplined.

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Completion squared yet again is a formally disciplined, psychologically intense, and thematically wide‑ranging collection. The constraint—49 poems, each four stanzas, each stanza four lines of seven syllables—creates a powerful tension between structure and volatility. The poems often feel like compressed emotional detonations forced into a tight grid.

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The book’s strongest qualities are its raw honesty, its formal rigour, and its unfiltered psychological immediacy. It is a portrait of a mind thinking at full voltage, often in extremis, yet always with craft.

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This is your most combustive book: the one where the pressure of lived experience pushes hardest against the frame.

 

Mr Fish’s fine kettle is a sharply observed, tonally consistent memoir‑poem that fuses social history, personal memory, and cultural critique into a single, roving sequence. Its strongest qualities are its voice—dry, unsentimental, and incisive—and its ability to compress whole sociological realities into tight, four‑line stanzas.

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The poem’s emotional force comes from its refusal to romanticise the past. Instead, it presents school as a crucible of randomness, cruelty, class tension, and accidental shaping forces. The work is at its best when it juxtaposes the mundane with the mythic, the comic with the bleak.