The ghosts in Frank Ormsby's new collection, his first since 1986, are both personal and historical.

The poems range in setting from the Irish Border counties to the Dardanelles, from the Smugglers' Restaurant, Carrickfergus, to Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, from Belfast to the racecourses of England.

They include typically direct and honest love poems, elegies for his father, poems with a sporting emphasis, and a sequence which reflects the joys and anxieties of expectant parenthood against a background of violence and ceasefire in the North of Ireland.