Weighing the Present

Weighing the Present includes poems about family and wider society, often through brilliantly evoked particular details and specific scenes from ‘everyday life’. Short linked poems, which amount almost to sequences, deal with difficult material – elegies for lost friends for instance – while still remaining somehow lifeaffirming. At the heart of the book are tender but unsentimental love poems. A new collection from Michael Laskey is always a cause for celebration.