Frowsty for the Carousel : Verse from a Foreign Correspondent

During a varied career of over 35 years with one of the world's leading international news agencies, Nick Moore reported from the capitals of India, Pakistan, Iran, Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Later when covering the OPEC oil cartel he became familiar with a further string of datelines from Bali and the Gulf states through Vienna, Paris, Munich and Geneva to Quito and cities in the United States.

The feelings of the man or woman behind those news reports are rarely, if ever, displayed - but in this first volume of succinct even minimalist verse Nick Moore, who read English at Cambridge in the 1960s, conveys with a brilliant and striking brevity his impressions and emotions in verse jotted in private notebooks over some four decades.

Held prisoner in one of Idi Amin's notorious jails, he encapsulates the horrors of that whole era of Africa's history with a fleeting reference to a sledgehammer that he believes he observed being rinsed quickly of blood and hair in an adjoining cell latrine. Deft references to his inner feelings at different stages of his life from childhood to the coming of age of his own family make this a uniquely brief autobiographical sketch in verse of a crowded lifetime spent quartering the world persistently and sometimes wearily in pursuit of the news.

The 'carousel' of the title refers not to the joyful machines found in funfairs, but to the airport baggage merry-go-rounds that inevitably await us all as we blearily arrive at our destination.