His voice is by turns celebratory, elegiac, inquisitive and quietly humorous, as he conjures a past that’s ‘bric-à-brac and hand-me-down’. As these poems trace their way backwards towards a ‘phone box lit up at the corner / like a spaceship that will never take off’, we meet along the road everyone from Elvis to Dolly Parton and Dolly the Sheep.

In his hands, time and place shift shape and take on new form as, like the couple driving through upstate New York in one of the collection’s later poems, we find ourselves entering the town of Ovid.