Paleface

Shortlisted for the 1996 Forward Prize. Candid and alert to the contemporary scene, the poems in Paleface render an immediately recognisable world, not least when ostensibly describing the rites and customs of a desert tribe. Many of the poems speak of the ways in which our lives surprise us: intimations of mortality in a Sunday market, unicorns at the zoo, a miracle in West London, redundancy and love. They distil a sense of sometimes painful, sometimes comic displacement that rings true to the facts.