Mocker is a book of journeys, from migrating Irish monks to a colony of puffins summering on a sea cliff, from Achill to Ljubljana. Amid the unromantic cityscapes of the post-industrial North of England, Wheatley produces a series of meditations on place and displacement. Birds of prey and domestic beasts vie with whalers’ wives, Cuchulainn and his cohorts, and St John himself, in the book’s richly varied dramatis personae. You go first, the driver of a hearse signals to the poet at a pedestrian crossing and, in work by turns blackly humorous and sensuously affirmative, David Wheatley confronts without flinching the enjoyable dilemma of what has been called ‘the trouble with being born’.