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So that’s what poets are: word-peckers, rhyming jackdaws of the world,

Beachcombers turning flotsam (with a sailor’s luck) to pearls.

The poems in Mike Harding’s sixth poetry collection, Cosmos Mariner, explore both what poetry means and what it means to be a poet. There is a dark undertone to his work here which in many cases reflects the current distracted political times. Longer poems such as ‘King Cotton’ and ‘A Murano Dagger’ go deeper and question received wisdoms. Against this, gentler poems such as ‘The Cleggan Sonnets’ and ‘The Curve of Love’ show Harding’s gift for capturing epiphanies and fixing them with a piercing simplicity that remains burned in the memory.