The abandoned settlements

The poems in James Sheard's remarkable third book are about love and leaving, of how the rift of departure brings on a kind of haunting - of the people involved and the places where they lived - an emotional trace of departed lives and loves.

This is what these poems are: the scars of separation, the spoors of desire.

Sheard writes powerfully about loss, about how the vestiges of significance, of sensual heat, are retained by structures - in ghost towns, war-zones, deserted villages or resorts - but also by the human body and memory.