Great Regulars: That reflectiveness highlights another

difference between [Neil Astley's] Being Human and its predecessors. Where Staying Alive and Being Alive were filled with poems that felt exigent, essential (even, in the case of Mary Oliver's subsequently much-quoted "Wild Geese", talismanic), the atmosphere of Being Human, as its title suggests, is more contemplative. Time--its passage and our relationship to it--is the overarching subject, and the section that tackles it specifically, "About time", sits at the heart of the book. Trains and rivers wind their way through the poems, memory is interrogated, and the moments of suspension in which, as Louis MacNeice has it, "Time was away and somewhere else", are rejoiced in.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Being Human, edited by Neil Astley--review

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