‘Elegant, haunted, mesmerizingly rich yet somehow untamed’ – KEN BABSTOCK

In The Third City, his most remarkable collection to date, James Peake once more offers us his unique combination of dream-like fluency and intellectual rigour. New and returning readers will discover an even more expansive poet in these pages, one who in poem after poem uncovers our capacity to love in full knowledge of the odds.

Here Peake confirms his reputation for ‘pin-sharp and trance-like poems’ (Wild Court) which ‘show us different ways of seeing’ (Raceme). He is a poet of deep originality whose works of artful indirection fully realise our daily world, even as they transform its familiar constraints into staging posts for larger, less comprehensible, places.