Listening In

52 pages. This collection of poems are by turns humorous, painful, spiky and eloquent, recalling Gareth Reeves's father, the poet and critic James Reeves. The collection culminates in a sequence of fourteen lyrics about his father's partial-sightedness. For Gareth Reeves the anxiety of influence is a filial matter. In other poems the quirks of memory stimulate a difficult truth-seeking - about an organ-playing chemistry teacher, an Oxford suicide and odd-ball, a black American con-artist, an expatriate Marxist Englishman in California, about teaching Vietnam draftees, about selling blood in pre-Junta Greece - whilst in poems such as "The Cockroach Sang in the Plane-tree", "High Life" and "Gaps" (about the poet Norman Cameron), the concern with mortality finds bleak and disconcerting expression. (SL#43).