Fifty two poems about one thing.

One love affair from the start of it to the end of it. That is the whole book. Fifty two poems and they go in order.

Some are very good. Text is very good. The one with the phone ringing in an empty room I went back to four or five times. Rapture itself I couldn't get on with.

The trouble is that a love affair is the most ordinary thing there is. She knows that. She uses the ordinary words on purpose. Sometimes it lands. Sometimes it is just ordinary words in a row.

I read the lot standing up in the kitchen. Then I went through it again over a week, two a night, which is the right way to do it.

Rain the whole of that week. It suited them.

The last ones are about it ending. Those are the ones I marked.

Seven. The good ones are very good. There did not need to be fifty two.

I heard her read on the radio years before I bought anything of hers. She read flatter than I had it in my head. Hers was better.