'I
sing of natural forces,
marriages, divorces.'
Readers
and reviewers — and audiences in many countries — delighted in what Paul Durcan pinpointed as 'great vigour
and extreme delicacy' in James Simmons's poems and songs while,
in The Observer, Peter Porter predicted, 'Many years from
now his handling of the vernacular will seem one of the lasting
styles of a very confused literary period.'
This book includes more than one hundred poems, among them the ballad,
'Claudy', which has entered the repertoire of folk music.
