Dirt by Billy Letford Eyewear Publishing and Contemporary Poetry from the

and Contemporary Poetry from the Canary Islands (1992)

and the début Carcanet title of one of the UK’s rising poetry talents

Translator Forrest Gander beautifully renders the eros and heartache

The sequence works so well as a story and is so nuanced I felt completely absorbed in it

His high-definition observation is informed by an ecologist’s eye

Dirt by Billy Letford Eyewear Publishing and Contemporary Poetry from theBilly Letfords Dirt revels in the fallow, the tainted, the off , and the unloved. The poems embrace a good life stitched together with bad circumstances, bungled chances, missed callings. Whether loitering on the street corner, poackets ful eh ma fingers, or stumbling from a bar like a monkey in the jungle of traffic, stinking, wild and free, the characters in Letfords poems deliver one thing in spades: heart. On Friday I visit my seventy seven year