Paleface

the long version

In Paleface, the free and subversive intelligence which has been heard to speak with growing confidence in each of Charles Boyle's four previous collections attains full authority. With exhilarating inventiveness, the poet finds new ways, in poem after poem, of expressing both his own predicament as he confronts the confusions and enigmas of middle age, and that of the politically distressed culture in which he finds himself living. Intimations of mortality at a Sunday market, unicorns at the zoo, a miracle in west London, the customs of a not-so-faraway tribe, redundancy and love - these poems distil a sense of sometimes painful, sometimes comic displacement that rings true to the facts.