Have there always been places where the inner life and the outer world can’t be told apart? Do the cities we’ve so skilfully shaped reciprocate in any way? If the meaning of a building or symbol is lost can it be restored or only reinvented? In his carefully meditated debut collection of poetry, James Peake explores the imagination’s material legacy – how our ideas have entered wood and stone, celluloid and skin, metal and glass, and become restless in the process. Reaction Time of Glass is a work of unusual clarity and coherence. Like the cityscapes it relishes, it is home to interiors – eerie or homely, dark as well as light, imaginative as much as factual – akin to those we’ve inherited and inside of which we perform our lives.