Patrick Lodge is a keen traveller. This is not, though, a book of travel poems; in his first collection, the Yorkshire- based poet uses the dislocation produced by travel to reflect his own displacements of growing up, family life and adult relationships – his own search for a “home” that might be lived in comfortably and at ease.

His prizewinning poems – which have been published in magazines and anthologies in England, Wales, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the USA – are enjoyable for their relish of language and their generous sense of what poetry can accommodate and achieve. The great subject of this collection is memory; in service of this, the author displays a masterful ability to step backwards and forwards across the world, and through history. As we journey from Australia to Ireland to Italy, from the late 19th century to the 1950s and into the present, Patrick and the reader are brought back time and again to the only question that matters – how am I different from when I started off?